BERNSTEIN PROGRAM NOTES
“Musical theater is an art that arises out of American roots, out of our speech, our tempo, our moral attitudes, our timing, our kind of humor.”
Leonard Bernstein
The Musical is arguably America’s greatest contribution to world culture. Although his output was limited to five major shows, Leonard Bernstein produced the acknowledged masterpiece of the genre, West Side Story.
Classical music, even program music, is, by nature, abstract; conversely, songs are not. With a song lyric, it is possible to tell, in fact it is essential to understand, exactly what that character is singing about, how he feels, what experience he is going through. While the songwriter may not always agree with the character he is writing about, the best songs reveal the mind and heart of the composer.
With this concert, I tried to reveal a bit of Leonard Bernstein through his theater music. No man could have written the exuberance of “New York, New York” without feeling the city in his blood. No man could have written “A Boy Like That” without passionately believing in racial tolerance.
Adolph Green, his frequent collaborator, told me that Lenny so loved the score to My Fair Lady, the two of them would sneak into the Mark Hellinger Theatre during a performance just to bask in the music. He would hear “Show Me” and, giddy with a excitement, would practically scream, “Now that’s a song!”
I have chosen a program of his theatre music to hopefully reveal the many facets of his notoriously complex and ebullient personality. Some of the songs will be old friends, some new acquaintances, some never performed before, but all of them are passionate, all of them are brilliant, and all of them are, of course, Lenny.
Glen Roven
In his words:
HOME
NEW YORK, NEW YORK HOWARD/JORDAN
OHIO CARLA/KIM
MY HOUSE CARLA
TAKE CARE OF THIS HOUSE KIM
“Home has always been the spot in which I happened to be: and now it is a place, with all that one place connotes: the dining room one apologizes for, and my studio where you get blind with cigarette-smoke, and the hall wallpaper you can’t stand, and our country bedroom, and the loud canary, and Jamie spreading her presence like a marigold, and the difficulties below-stairs, and Bill [the doorman] with his weather, and all the problems and tensions and joy and noise and quiet. Home. A new experience.”
About New York: “It’s this town that still gets me. No wonder I keep composing about it. I’ve lived here for so long, sometimes I don’t even notice it anymore—and then I open my eyes and, my god! It’s so dramatic and alive!”
HOT
FANCY FREE VARIATIONS ORCHESTRA
BIG STUFF CARLA
I CAN COOK, TOO KIM
“What did ragtime have that made it so enticing—the blue notes, the syncopations, the trombone smears? No. You can’t reduce it to its technical components. The thing that made it so irresistible was that it had life; it was fresh and vital—it swung.”
“I love jazz because it is an original kind of musical expression, in that it is never wholly sad or wholly happy. Even the Blues has a robustness and hard-boiled quality that never lets it become sticky-sentimental, no matter how self-pitying the words are.”
HAPPINESS
SOMETHING’S COMING HOWARD
MARIA JORDAN
A BOY LIKE THAT CARLA/KIM
“I believe in people. I feel, love, need, and respect people above all else, including the arts, natural scenery, organized piety, or nationalistic superstructures. One human figure on the slope of an Alp can make the Alp disappear for me. One person fighting for the truth can disqualify for me the platitudes of the centuries. And one human being whp meets with injustice can render invalid the entire system which has dispensed it.”
“Love is the way we have of communicating personally in the deepest way.”
HOMAGE
LITTLE WHITE HOUSE HOWARD/JORDAN/KIM/CARLA
CANDIDE OVERTURE ORCHESTRA
TROUBLE IN TAHITI KIM
GLITTER AND BE GAY CARLA
“Operettas—dated and clumsy as they seem now—performed a great service in the early years of this century. They accustomed the audience to good songs and good lyrics, to stories that were fresh and charming, but most of all to a new level of musical accomplishment. For the opera was no mere collection of songs. It was musically elaborate, closer to opera…Thus operetta became part of the audience’s growing up and coming to understand and enjoy a certain amount of musical complexity. As a result, Broadway audiences, which had not been trained to enjoy grand opera, were being prepared, through operetta, for the more ambitious musical comedies we have today.”
ACT TWO
HUMOR
ON THE TOWN VARIATIONS ORCHESTRA
WRONG NOTE RAG KIM/CARLA
100 EASY WAYS KIM
YA GOT ME HOWARD/JORDAN/KIM/CARLA
“I love jazz because of its humor. It really plays with notes. We always speak of “playing” music: we play Brahms or we play Bach—a term perhaps more properly applied to tennis. But jazz is real play. It “fools around” with notes, so to speak, and has fun with them. It is, therefore, entertainment in the truest sense.”
HOPE
SIMPLE SONG HOWARD
HERE COMES THE SUN HOWARD/JORDAN/KIM/CARLA
IT MUST BE SO JORDAN
SPRING WILL COME AGAIN KIM
MAKE OUR GARDEN GROW CARLA/JORDAN/HOWARD/KIM
I believe that man’s noblest endowment is his capacity to change. In this he is divine. Man cannot have dignity without loving the dignity of his fellow. I believe in the potential of people. If we are to believe that man can never achieve a society without wars, then we are condemned to wars forever. This is the easy way. But the laborious, loving way, the way of dignity and divinity, presupposes a belief in people and in their capacity to change, grow, communicate, and love…We must believe in the attainability of good. We must believe in people.
