It’s astonishing to think that Leonard Bernstein would have turned 80 this year.
He will always remain frozen in memory as the century’s great protean American musician. Doing too much was a credo for this profuse composer, conductor, pianist, teacher and TV showman for music. In an age of specialization he was a shameless eclectic who tried to embrace the entire world in his music, as did Mahler before him. What American music, and the world, lost at his death in 1990 was incalculable.
For Bernstein, no walls separated the concert hall, the musical theater, the Hollywood film stage, the jazz club — it was all music to him. Now that crossover and pluralism have become ’90s buzzwords, Lenny seems more a prophet than a reckless magpie. Uneven his music may be, but it’s just as true he brought a charismatic exuberance, a wonderfully vital melodic gift all his own, to every genre he touched.
And his music has staying power. That much was clear from the all-Bernstein program William Eddins conducted with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Thursday at Symphony Center. Eddins, one of the orchestra’s assistant conductors, focused on the Lenny of the 1940s and ’50s — his strongest creative period, when he wore every hat with distinction, whether as Broadway baby (“On the Town,” “Candide”), film composer (“On the Waterfront”) or serious symphonist (“The Age of Anxiety,” Symphony No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra).
It wasn’t surprising to find Eddins teasing plenty of rhythmic bounce from this music. What was surprising was how much new help the hall gave him. Over the holidays, Orchestra Hall’s resident acoustician, Lawrence Kirkegaard, had applied sealant to the surfaces in the large chamber above the stage that had been absorbing high-frequency sounds, especially violin sound.
This has resulted in a gain in brightness — too much so for the “Candide” Overture, where the E-flat clarinet was positively raucous. Musicians still must learn they no longer need to force to be heard in the new Orchestra Hall. Still, the overall sonic improvement over late last year is noticeable.
Thursday the upper strings sounded more velvety while the various solo winds, especially the saxophone and muted trumpet, came through just fine in the Three Dance Episodes from “On the Town.” Everybody, in fact, appeared to be having the time of his life.
The least-known Bernstein opus of the evening turned out to be the “On the Waterfront” Symphonic Suite (1955). A lonely sax wailing against the violent gunfire of drums, a simple, consoling melody that tears your heart out: Why can’t today’s Hollywood give us film music half this good? Eddins directed with evident feeling for the score’s rhetorical power and romantic sweep.
Finally, there was “Age of Anxiety” to prove, once and for all, that there is no real difference between the popular and serious Bernstein. You don’t have to have read W.H. Auden’s poem to appreciate the enormous craft and musicianship that went into this score, which stands halfway between a symphony and a piano concerto, with echoes of Shostakovich, Copland and honkytonk. Alan Gampel, a gifted pianist with big hands, quick fingers and a debonair command of the idiom, dispatched the solo part about as well as it can be played. Eddins was equally at home in the darkly brooding pages as he was in the jazzy sections.
The program will be repeated at 8 p.m. Saturday.
