In amongst all the musical gamesmanship of Arias and Barcarolles (Bernstein ‘at home’ in Serial City), it’s the allusion to Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes that seems to me the most significant and most telling. It’s the social context of that work, the invitation of the waltz, public salons and private drawing-room, the heady air of soiree, formality masquerading as informality. On a more basic level, it’s the time-honoured intimacy of voice and keyboard that lends Arias and Barcarolles its particular character. So it was conceived, so it shall prevail. Any orchestration – and this one from Bruce Coughlin follows a version for strings and percussion by Bright Sheng – is like an invasion of privacy. It takes the piece somewhere else; it distracts from, pulls focus from, the ingenuity and intrigue of the word-play, it over-paints the musical allusions, shifts the emphasis from implicit to explicit. I’m not sure I want to hear so much as to sense the Bergian and Straussian intimations of “Little Smary” in Coughlin’s orchestration: Smary’s triumphant recovery of her “wuddit” (rabbit) all but brings the Marschallin sweeping downstage. Likewise, the Mahlerian ironies of “The wedding”, or the bumptious Shostakovich march violating the wee small hours to provoke the domestic drama of “Mr and Mrs Webb say goodnight”. And isn’t “Greeting” (a setting of words written on the birth of the composer’s son Alexander) that much more touching when floated on just a few spare piano chords? When even one listener is too many. “The world is pure”, concludes the text. Not with flute and strings it ain’t. It seems to me that the essence of Arias and Barcarolles is contained in the postlude – “Nachspiel” – a slow waltz, sweet and indelible and so very personal, the hummed descant like a shared confidence. Yet, here, that descant is somehow incidental; the orchestra begs our indulgence. Which is not to say that these voices aren’t attention-grabbing. Hampson and von Stade don’t miss a trick. Individually, and as sparring partners, they come on a treat. It’s just that I want them back where they belong – in private.
Not so, the suite from A Quiet Place, a tough and affecting and viable synthesis of the opera in symphonic terms. Michael Tilson Thomas and Sid Ramin (with assistance from Michael Barrett) second-guess Bernstein with uncanny sureness and sleight of hand. The opera might have begun here, forged out of, driven by, the burden of guilt which weighs so heavily in every bar. The sound of it (right down to the oddly retrogressive bursts of twanging synthesizer) is echt Bernstein, the virtuoso trombone transposition of Sam’s tell-all aria exploding in an angry, jazzy, vernacular that almost upstages the original. But the voices are always there in your subconscious, bright as a button and close-harmonied in the jazz trio “Mornin’ sun” (Trouble in Tahiti’s bebopping Greek Chorus) which here graduates from combo to big-band, as befits the symphonic scale. The sudden disorientation works well: a flashback in every sense. And so, too, does the idea of transposing the Postlude to Act 1 as a kind of benediction to the suite as a whole. Here is another of those cathartic moments that Bernstein always seemed to nail just right. The LSO sound as if they were in at the inception of this one. They were.
On a good night they could dispatch the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story like few orchestras I know. Such a night – live at the Barbican Hall – came towards the end of Tilson Thomas’s tenure as the LSO’s Music Director, and nobody present will ever forget it. Hot, and then some – I think that’s the phrase. Not a phrase I’d use to describe this earlier vintage. It’s good – very good in its reflections on “Somewhere” or the ever-hopeful “I have a love” (tender, indeed, is the night). But when the heat is on, so too are the inhibitors (one might envisage the session – a grey September morning in London’s Henry Wood Hall). It’s a flashy vehicle all right (cool paint job, all chromium fittings), but it’s driving with the handbrake on. Even Maurice Murphy’s mariachi trumpet break in the “Mambo” doesn’t quite fry the air around him.
Mixed feelings, then. But at least you can retreat to that not-so-quiet place with confidence.'