CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
New York Philharmonic

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Pre-concert talk starts at 7:00 PM in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage with Burton Bernstein and Thomas Cabaniss, composer and Faculty, The Juilliard School.

New York Philharmonic
Alan Gilbert, Conductor
Glenn Dicterow, Violin
Ana María Martínez, Soprano
Paul Groves, Tenor
New York Choral Artists
Joseph Flummerfelt, Chorus Director

BERNSTEIN On the Waterfront Symphonic Suite
BERNSTEIN Serenade (After Plato's Symposium)
BERNSTEIN West Side Story Suites Nos. 1 and 2

Encores:
BERNSTEIN Overture from Candide
BERNSTEIN Mambo from West Side Story

This concert is made possible by a generous gift from Mr. and Mrs. A. Alfred Taubman.

Sponsored by Continental Airlines, the Official Airline of Carnegie Hall

The New York Philharmonic's performance is sponsored by Yoko Nagae Ceschina.

Alan Gilbert's appearance is made possible through the New York Philharmonic's Daisy and Paul Soros Endowment Fund.

Major funding for Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds has been provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Alice Tully Foundation, American Express, Bob and Martha Lipp, The Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation, Nash Family Foundation, and Mr. and Mrs. A. Alfred Taubman.

Additional funding provided by GWFF USA Inc., and Linda and Stuart Nelson.

Generous support has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Program Notes:

Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990)
Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront

Composed in 1954 as a film score and revised in 1955 as a concert suite, the Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on May 12, 1960, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

Like many other musicians past and present, Leonard Bernstein had to struggle to balance the competing demands of composing and conducting, not to mention (in his case) other musical and extra-musical pursuits as a pianist, media personality, and all-around celebrity. Time for composition was potentially the most endangered in the mix, and he had to take special care to see that it didn’t get entirely crowded out by his day-to-day obligations as a performer. As a composer he could be chameleonic, turning on a dime between music of complex modernity and pieces that plumbed a more popular vein. He was accordingly a success in a surprisingly broad spectrum of musical life, producing not only masterpieces of the symphonic repertoire but also ballets, operas, and Broadway classics such as On the Town and West Side Story.

Although others of Bernstein’s dramatic scores were used in film adaptations (including both of those stage musicals), the 1954 Elia Kazan film On the Waterfront represents the only time he composed expressly for the cinema. The film’s scenario is a gritty tale of corruption and exploitation on the New York docks, and Kazan had already finished filming (with an all-star cast of serious actors that included Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger, and Eva Marie Saint) before he started worrying about the music. When the producer Sam Spiegel first approached Bernstein about the project, the composer demurred; he was no fan of Kazan, who had gained notoriety as an enthusiastic informant to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952. Bernstein, in contrast, had been among the 50 arts celebrities who, in 1947, had signed a manifesto condemning those very hearings; since 1943 the FBI had been keeping a file on his politically liberal activities, which would eventually comprise about 700 pages. One might not have predicted that the collaboration of these two creative powerhouses would yield happy results.

Nonetheless, Bernstein consented to screen the film in its scoreless, rough-cut state and was immediately won over. “I heard music as I watched,” he later reported.

That was enough. And the atmosphere of talent that this film gave off was exactly the atmosphere in which I love to work and collaborate … Day after day I sat at a movieola, running the print back and forth, measuring in feet the sequences I had chosen for the music, converting feet into seconds by mathematical formula, making homemade cue sheets.

The score became an instant classic, a prototype of an unabashed, urban “New York sound” that became much imitated by other composers faced with similar settings. Asked to name what he considered Bernstein’s greatest achievement as a composer, the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich predictably cited Bernstein’s Meditations for Cello (from Mass), but quickly added: “I also think that without him the United States could not have existed musically. Because he is a portrait of United States music. His Suite from On the Waterfront I have conducted many, many times, and this music smells of the United States. But it is a good smell!”

All in all, Bernstein’s music accompanies about 35 minutes of the film, which reflects the propensity of all Kazan films to use music sparingly but with terrific impact. Although this score was nominated for an Oscar, it was passed over in favor of Dmitri Tiomkin’s music for The High and the Mighty. This slight, indefensible in retrospect, may account for the fact that this would remain Bernstein’s one and only film score.

Little more than a year after the film was released Bernstein unveiled his Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront. Prior to its premiere Bernstein explained, “The main materials from the suite undergo numerous metamorphoses, following as much as possible the chronological flow of the film score itself.” Bernstein had been frustrated by the procrustean exigencies of film composing, but in the Symphonic Suite he created an opportunity to present his music as he wanted it to be.


Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium) for Violin, String Orchestra, Harp, and Percussion

Composed in the years 1953–54, the Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium) received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on April 18, 1956, with Isaac Stern, violin, and the Symphony of the Air conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre, spent the summer of 1954 in a home they rented on Martha’s Vineyard, a site sufficiently isolated to allow Bernstein to concentrate on two major compositions. “My life is all Lillian Hellman and Candide,” he wrote to friends, “and the violin concerto for Isaac Stern to premiere at the Venice Festival in September.” Candide would end up dragging on and on; it was brought to its first completion in 1956, but Bernstein kept rewriting it for the rest of his career. The “violin concerto,” however, was accomplished in less than a year once he set about working on it seriously in the fall of 1953, and people close to the composer reported that through the course of ensuing decades it remained one of his works of which he remained the fondest. The roots of the piece go back to the summer of 1951, when the Koussevitzky Music Foundation commissioned Bernstein to write a piece in memory of the recently departed conductor Serge Koussevitzky, who had served as the young musician’s mentor.

That Bernstein was a highly literate man is beyond question. His fellow composer-and-conductor-and-pianist Lukas Foss once said in an interview about Bernstein: “Probably the reason he had so much success with his collaborations in the music theater was that he was fired by the intrusion of the other arts, that they inspired his imagination. I would say that Lenny was the most well-read composer I have ever met.” A number of Bernstein’s works relate to literary sources of grand standing, including his early incidental music for The Birds and The Peace (two plays by Aristophanes), Candide (from Voltaire’s novella, itself a response to Leibniz), West Side Story (ultimately from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), and the “Age of Anxiety” Symphony (after poems by Auden).

He is known to have been reading Plato in 1951, at about the time the Koussevitzky Foundation extended its commission, but there’s no indication that he decided to attach Plato to the commission until later. The Bernstein biographer Humphrey Burton believes that the connection may have been forged “not long before the completion of the work, since a glance at Plato reveals obvious discrepancies between Bernstein’s adaptation and the original.” “Bernstein,” he notes,

names the individual movements of the concerto after the various speakers at the banquet but has changed the order of the speeches and modified their character. Thus in Bernstein’s version, Aristophanes, the comic playwright, becomes “a bedtime storyteller, invoking the fairy-tale mythology of love.” Moreover, Bernstein shifts the emotional center of gravity from Socrates to Agathon. The fourth movement of the concerto, dedicated to Agathon, contains some of the most beautiful music of any 20th-century score. But in Plato it is Socrates who has the longest and most important speech.

These are cogent observations, and they do lend credence to the idea that episodes from Plato’s Symposium may have been largely superimposed over a piece that had already found its own shape.

The decision to call this half-hour-long work a serenade, rather than a concerto, also seems to have come quite late in the process of composition, as is evident from Bernstein’s regularly referring to it as a concerto during the months preceding its completion. Burton imagines that Bernstein may have selected the name as an allusion to the fact that some early serenades were used for wooing—literally, serenades sung beneath a balcony. He writes,

What Bernstein surely meant us to understand was that his Serenade embodied all his loving feelings toward all his fellow human beings. Complete movements from Bernstein’s Anniversaries, short piano pieces dedicated to loving friends, are woven into the musical fabric of three of the Serenade’s five movements. But the work can also be perceived as a portrait of Bernstein himself: grand and noble in the first movement, childlike in the second, boisterous and playful in the third, serenely calm and tender in the fourth, a doom-laden prophet and then a jazzy iconoclast in the finale.

Bernstein himself penned a program note for the work the day after he signed off on the score for his Serenade:

There is no literal program for this Serenade, despite the fact that it resulted from a re-reading of Plato’s charming dialogue, “The Symposium.” The music, like the dialogue, is a series of related statements in praise of love, and generally follows the Platonic form through the succession of speakers at the banquet. The “relatedness” of the movements does not depend on common thematic material, but rather on a system whereby each movement evolves out of elements in the preceding one.

For the benefit of those interested in literary allusion, I might suggest the following points as guideposts:

I. Phaedrus: Pausanius (Lento; Allegro). Phaedrus opens the symposium with a lyrical oration in praise of Eros, the god of love (Fugato, begun by the solo violin). Pausanias continues by describing the duality of lover and beloved. This is expressed in a classical sonata-allegro, based on the material of the opening fugato.

II. Aristophanes (Allegretto). Aristophanes does not play the role of clown in this dialogue, but instead that if the bedtime story-teller, invoking the fairytale mythology of love.

III. Eryximachus (Presto). The physician speaks of bodily harmony as a scientific model for the workings of love-patterns. This is an extremely short fugato scherzo, born of a blend of mystery and humor.

IV. Agathon (Adagio). Perhaps the most moving speech of the dialogue, Agathon’s panegyric embraces all aspects of love’s powers, charms and functions. This movement is a simple three-part song.

V. Socrates: Alcibiades (Molto tenuto; Allegro molto vivace). Socrates describes his visit to the seer Diotima, quoting her speech on the demonology of love. This is a slow introduction of greater weight than any of the preceding movements; and serves as a highly developed reprise of the middle section of the Agathon movement, thus suggesting a hidden sonata-form. The famous interruption of Alcibiades and his band of drunken revelers ushers in the Allegro, which is an extended Rondo ranging in spirit from agitation through jig-like dance music to joyful celebration. If there is a hint of jazz in the celebration, I hope it will not be taken as anachronistic Greek party-music, but rather the natural expression of a contemporary American composer imbued with the spirit of that timeless dinner party.


West Side Story Concert Suites No. 1 and No. 2, for Soprano and Tenor Soloists, and Orchestra

Composed principally from fall 1955 to summer 1957, the musical West Side Story received its world premiere on August 19, 1957, at the National Theatre in Washington, DC. The Concert Suites were assembled posthumously as excerpts drawn from the original Broadway score and have been newly revised for use by symphony orchestra; tonight’s performance marks the Suites’ Carnegie Hall premiere.

As early as 1949 Leonard Bernstein and his friends Jerome Robbins (the choreographer) and Arthur Laurents (the librettist) had batted around the idea of creating a musical retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, set amid the tensions of rival social groups in modern New York City. The project took a long time to find its eventual form. An early version tentatively titled East Side Story was set to explore tensions between Catholics and Jews on the Lower East Side, but a rash of gang-related fatalities in 1956 thrust the Upper West Side into the headlines, and it seemed timely to re-site the show accordingly.

Bernstein carried out much of the composition more or less concurrently with work on his opera Candide. Music flowed in both directions between the two scores: The duet “O Happy We” in Candide started life as a duet in West Side Story, while West Side Story’s “One Hand, One Heart” and “Gee, Officer Krupke” originated in Candide before finding their proper places. It was also just then, in November 1956, that Bernstein was named, with Dimitri Mitropoulos, to be Co-Principal Conductor of the New York Philharmonic, an appointment that not only revivified a relationship with the orchestra that had been dormant for the preceding six years but also placed him in a position to succeed Mitropoulos as the Orchestra’s Music Director, an eventuality that would take place beginning with the 1958–59 season.

As the production of West Side Story moved into the home stretch, it was beset with several crises. Cheryl Crawford, the producer, got cold feet about what she termed “a show full of hatefulness and ugliness,” but her partner Roger Stevens jumped in to ensure that the project would continue. Also, the young Stephen Sondheim, who had been brought on as lyricist, snagged the interest of his friend Harold Prince to be involved as a producer. To everyone’s amazement, Robbins announced at the 11th hour that he would rather spend his time directing than choreographing the show, thereby jeopardizing Prince’s participation; in the end, he was persuaded to stay on as choreographer, and was granted an unusually long rehearsal period as an inducement.

On August 19, 1957, West Side Story opened in a try-out run in Washington, DC, and proved a very firm hit when it reached Broadway, running for 772 performances—just short of two years—then embarking on a national tour, and making its way back to New York in 1960 for another 253 performances before being released as a feature film in 1961.

“The radioactive fallout from West Side Story must still be descending on Broadway this morning,” wrote Walter Kerr, critic of the Herald Tribune, in the wake of the opening in New York, and one might argue that his assumption remains true a half-century later. West Side Story stands as an essential, influential chapter in the history of American theater, and its engrossing tale of young love against a background of spectacularly choreographed gang warfare has found a place at the core of Americans’ common culture.

The music of West Side Story has been adapted into countless arrangements ranging from stand-alone numbers to large-scale concert suites. The best known of these is doubtless the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, which Bernstein created in 1961, with his colleagues Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, at about the time that the film version of the how was putting new wind in the work’s sails (and sales). Classic that it is, listeners have been known to voice disappointment that it doesn’t include the music of such evergreens as “America”; “One Hand, One Heart”; “I Feel Pretty”; or “Tonight.” (To be able to omit such stellar items in itself speaks of the stellar quality of the overall score.) The Concert Suites performed tonight were assembled posthumously, and they present a selection of eight essential numbers from the show, sung as they would be in a staged production by Tony and Maria, the star crossed lovers.

Copyright © 2008 by James M. Keller

James M. Keller is the Program Annotator for the New York Philharmonic.

New York Philharmonic
Alan Gilbert, Conductor
The New York Philharmonic is the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States and one of the oldest in the world and has long played a leading role in American musical life. Lorin Maazel became Music Director in 2002, succeeding Kurt Masur in a distinguished line of 20th-century musical giants that has included Bernstein, Zubin Mehta, and Pierre Boulez; Mahler, Walter, and Toscanini. Since its founding in 1842, the Orchestra has championed the new music of its time, commissioning or premiering many important works, from Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World” (1893) and Gershwin’s An American in Paris (1928) to John Adams’s Pulitzer Prize–winning On the Transmigration of Souls (2002, the CD of which received three Grammy Awards), and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Piano Concerto (2007).

Over the last century the Philharmonic has become renowned around the globe, having appeared in 422 cities in 59 countries on five continents. In February 2008 the Orchestra made an historic visit to Pyongyang, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—the first performance there by an American orchestra and an event watched around the world.

Long a media pioneer, the Philharmonic began radio broadcasts in 1922, and is currently represented by The New York Philharmonic This Week; the program is syndicated nationally 52 weeks per year, streamed on the Orchestra’s website, nyphil.org, and carried on XM Satellite Radio. In addition, the Orchestra’s concerts are now broadcast throughout Europe on BBC Radio 3. On television, in the 1950s and ‘60s the Philharmonic inspired a generation of music lovers through Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, telecast on CBS; its presence on television has continued with annual appearances Live From Lincoln Center, which began with that series’s inaugural episode in 1976. In 2003 the Philharmonic made television history as the first orchestra ever to perform live on the Grammy Awards telecast, one of the most-watched television events worldwide.

The New York Philharmonic may be the most recorded orchestra in history, with more than 1,500 authorized releases to its credit, starting with its first pressing in 1917. The Internet has expanded the Orchestra’s reach, and in 2006 the Philharmonic became the first major American orchestra to offer downloadable concerts, recorded live, which are available on the DG Concerts label, exclusively on iTunes.

On June 4, 2007, the New York Philharmonic proudly announced a new partnership with Credit Suisse, its first-ever and exclusive Global Sponsor.

Glenn Dicterow, Violin
New York Philharmonic Concertmaster Glenn Dicterow made his solo debut at age 11 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He went on to win numerous awards and competitions, including the Young Musicians Foundation Award and Coleman Award (Los Angeles), The Julia Klumpke Award (San Francisco), and the Bronze Medal in the International Tchaikovsky Competition (1970). He is a graduate of The Juilliard School.

In 1967 Mr. Dicterow made his New York Philharmonic debut at the age of 18. He joined the Orchestra as Concertmaster in 1980. Highlights of his annual Philharmonic solo performances have included Bernstein’s Serenade, conducted by the composer, on a 1986 American tour; a 1990 Live From Lincoln Center telecast; a concerto at the White House in 1982; and playing for more than 10,000 people at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, in 1999. Last season he joined Music Director Lorin Maazel and Principal Cello Carter Brey in performances of Brahms’s Double Concerto both in New York and on the Philharmonic’s 2007 tour of Europe. Mr. Dicterow has been a soloist with orchestras from Los Angeles to Montreal. Other highlights have included performances with the Leipzig Gewandhaus and Hong Kong Philharmonic, and performing Bernstein’s Serenade with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra in Isaac Stern’s 80th birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall.

Glenn Dicterow’s discography includes solo and chamber works by Copland, Ives, and Korngold. He has recorded concertos with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra, as well as with the New York Philharmonic. His most recent CD is a solo recital for Cala Records’s New York Legends series. He can also be heard in the violin solos of film scores including The Turning Point, The Untouchables, Altered States, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Interview with the Vampire.

Mr. Dicterow is on the faculty of Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music. He and his wife, violist Karen Dreyfus, are founding members of The Lyric Piano Quartet, which is in residence at Queens College.

Ana María Martínez, Soprano

Paul Groves, Tenor

New York Choral Artists
Joseph Flummerfelt, Chorus Director
The New York Choral Artists, a professional chorus founded by Joseph Flummerfelt in 1979, appears regularly with the New York Philharmonic. Highlights of recent performances with the Orchestra include Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem in September 2001, commemorating the events of September 11, and the world premiere, in fall 2002, of John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls. In 2006 the chorus performed Verdi’s Requiem and Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges, both with Lorin Maazel, and Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, with Xian Zhang. Their most recent collaboration with the Philharmonic was in June 2007, in a concert version of Puccini’s Tosca, led by Music Director Lorin Maazel. Other performance highlights include celebrating the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986 and the 100th anniversary of Carnegie Hall, and the US premiere of Paul McCartney’s Standing Stone with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. The New York Choral Artists have sung under the batons of Bernstein, Chailly, Sir Colin Davis, Leinsdorf, Masur, Muti, Nelson, Shaw, Slatkin, Tilson Thomas, and others.

The chorus’ discography features many recordings with the New York Philharmonic, including On the Transmigration of Souls with Lorin Maazel and Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 with Leonard Bernstein, both of which won Grammy Awards; Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder with Zubin Mehta; Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13, “Babi Yar,” with Kurt Masur; and Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. Recordings with other orchestras include Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Oedipus Rex, and Requiem Canticles; Beethoven’s The Ruins of Athens; Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess; an album of Christmas songs featuring soprano Kathleen Battle; and a Christmas album conducted by Joseph Flummerfelt.