Records

Lollipops

Anthony Burgess

Bernstein Halil/Mass/On the Waterfront (DG 2532 051)

Iwas in Milan recently (to receive the Premio Branca, if anyone is interested) and in La Scala heard Bernstein conducting Stravinsky. I then went to Rome, where I Met the poet Richard Wilbur. Returning to Monaco, I found both these highly creative Americans waiting for me in a repressing of their Candide. This is a musical version of Voltaire which met but a feeble response on its first Broadway presentation but is now, thanks possibly to a belated American realisation of the dangers of Panglos- sianism, at last quietly established as a sort of small stage classic. Max Adrian is Pangloss and very good too. Wilbur's lyrics are superb, as they should be, since he is a superb versifier — more important in this kind of context than being (which he also is) a superb poet. It is the music which worries me. It fits the words and, since the or- chestration is mostly Bernstein's own and

not that of some overpaid Broadway hack, has a very individual sound, but it fails melodically. Nothing to whistle, in fact. Most people I know who admire the score and this recording (in its former form) res- pond, I think, chiefly to the lyrics and are glad that rousing tunes don't get in the way of them. Things were somewhat different in West Side Story.

I am pretty well forced to concentrate on Bernstein in this article, since CBS has brought out a six-volume series named 'The Bernstein Years' (the Candide disc is called Volume IV), and we are being asked to reappraise him not merely as a composer but as a conductor. I must confess that I was' desperately disappointed with him at La Scala, but that may have been chiefly the fault of the Scala Orchestra, which has difficulties with post-Puccinian music. I have never in my life heard so dull a Petrouchka, and in the Symphony of Psalms (despite the high competence of the Scala Chorus) I dropped off for a moment. I did not stay for Le Sacre, but was assured later by sharp-eared Milanese that the wind did not do well in it. It may be that Bern- stein is losing the dynamism which once enabled him to whip brilliance out of near- mediocrity; he may, like everyone else, have been oppressed by the Milan heat. The first volume of 'The Bernstein Years', The Best of Bernstein, shows him in finer, or cooler, form, but it does not show him stretched. He gives us what Beecham called lollipops.

I don't think many of us care all that much who conducts works like the Zampa Overture and Grieg's Norwegian Dances. Nobody who can wag a stick is really capable of going wrong with them. Beecham's peculiar distinction in conduc- ting works like the Ballet Music from Faust lay in his trying to conjure a previously unheard variety and delicacy from what the world would term vulgar. Bernstein is not Beecham, and it could be any new conser- vatoire graduate on the job here in the Valse des Fleurs and the Ritual Fire Dance. But he is better qualified than a man like Karajan to render Ferde Grofe, a fine American composer at present neglected. It was Grofe who orchestrated the Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin at that time not having taken French lessons. I wish Bernstein had given us the entire Grand Canyon Suite, in- stead of just the admirable middle move- ment called 'On the Trail'. This is fine truly American music with a Twainian wit in it. We are also regaled with, which we don't strictly need, the Overture to Candide (the rhyme there is Wilburian and intentional). The New York Philharmonic could play most of these works withOut a conductor and, for all we know, does.

Bernstein goes to Tel Aviv and Deutsche Grammophon for a recital of his own works with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. The first of these is Halil (Hebrew for flute), a rhapsody for solo flute — played remarkably by Jean-Pierre Rampal — with

Richard Ingrains will resume his television column next week. percussion and strings. It was composed in memory of Yadin Tanenbaum, another fine flautist who, at the age of 19, was killed in the 1973 war. Bernstein provides an explicit programme about the war-peace, love-hate conflict which is, he says, expressed in the conflict between the tonal and the non- tonal. In so far as music is capable of con- veying anything except itself, we may take

this opposition as valid for our times. The 12-tone system, 70 years after Pierrot Lunaire, has not replaced traditional tonal

language. We have not learned to accept it as anything other than a means of depicting neurosis in the individual and breakdown in the state. Bernstein's 12-note germ, in the manner of late Stravinsky, breaks up into cells, and these cells are capable of both tonal and atonal interpretation. At the end of the work we seem to be in a kind of D flat.

Mstislav Rostropovich plays the Three Meditations from the strange Mass Bern-

stein composed for 'Singers, Players and Dancers' in 1971. This is tonal enough (I distinctly hear G minor and A major triads in it) and sonically rather interesting. I feared schmaltz but did not get it. Percus- sion, especially hand drums, helps to drag the cello tone into a kind of open air where the Mass rediscovers its origins in primitive ritual. We're aware of what comes before and after these subjective broodings and ex- trovert caperings — Confession, Gloria and Epistles. Here is the ultimate ecumenism. As music these Meditations give Rostro- povich technically interesting things to do, but the melodic content lacks distinction.

Finally we have a Symphonic Suite drawn from Bernstein's music for the film On the Waterfront. The programme note speaks of `ein musikalisches Portrait von Leben and Liebe in New York' and, if we tie the sounds down to images of skyscrapers as a background for young love and violence, the description serves well enough. It is clear that most American music is happiest when it is serving an all-American. pro- gramme (we have our own Pistons and Bab- bitts in Europe, but we do not have a Charles Ives), and what is interesting about Bernstein's suite is the manner in which Europe — mainly, I think, Stravinsky — is given American nationality solely through scenic and emotional association. It is not great music, but it does not have to be.

If I seem to be somewhat lukewarm in my assessment of Bernstein as both conductor and composer, this is perhaps because I find in him no large emanation of in- dividual vision. As a New Yorker and a Jew he is heir to the whole of Europe, but in Europe he is welcomed as a voice, or baton, of America. He represents various kinds of American glamour — the beautiful people, the brief-lived Kennedy Camelot, Broad- way, Hollywood — as well as a very American technical efficiency which he ap- plies to a wide, perhaps too wide, reper- toire. I found him at his best once in Lon- don, when, to bored royalty, he both played and conducted the Ravel Piano Con- certo. He is an admirable pianist and he knows the orchestra from the inside, as only a composer who conducts his own works can. But we have only to think of the fiercely dedicated Toscanini to realise that the Bernsteinian magic is somewhat ex- traneous. He has built no orchestra from scratch, and he is sometimes unsure of the demarcation line between musicianship and showmanship. This, of course, is very American.

© Anthony Burgess 1982