Leonard Bernstein - From Broadway to Lincoln Center
Program notes by Artistic Director Thomas Lloyd

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was perhaps the most iconic American musician of the 20th Century. He used his charismatic musicality to engage new listeners in both classical music and musical theater, not only through his many live performances and studio recordings, but through the still relatively new medium of (black-and-white!) television.

Bernstein was known worldwide as a conductor, composer, and educator. Given the breadth of his genius, the Choral Society’s program focuses on Bernstein’s natural flair in writing for the human voice and on with the central importance educating young people had throughout his career.

Our program will feature three young Bucks County soloists selected through our annual Voices of the Future competition. Our featured professional soloist, Elizabeth Shammash, just worked with these soloists at our April 19 Voices of the Future finalist master class at the James Lorah Memorial Home in Doylestown.

We are also thrilled to include on this program the young voices of current students of our concert venue itself: the Select Choir of Lenape Middle School, directed by Jaime Rogers. This is a school that prioritizes music education, with music from Bernstein’s Peter Pan already in their repertory.

Bernstein played an indirect role in my own musical education through his longtime association with the summer classical training programs at Tanglewood, where I spent five summers, first as a bassoonist in the high school academy and later as a vocalist in the Fellowship program. He was a ubiquitous presence on campus, and I was lucky to sit in on many of his master classes and concerts with student soloists and ensembles, and sing with the Festival Chorus when he conducted the Boston Symphony. I remember especially how he was always “in the moment” and brought a theatrical pacing and sense of drama to everything he conducted.

Our featured soloist Elizabeth Shammash is not only a leading recitalist and concert singer, but is a prominent Jewish cantor in New York. She is deeply familiar not only with Bernstein’s extensive song literature but with the important connections throughout his music to his Jewish familial roots. The closing selection on this concert is the third movement of his Chichester Psalms, with its closing text from Psalm 133, “Hineh mah tov”-  Behold how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.

We’ve included a broad stylistic range of Bernstein’s vocal writing for both solo voice and for choir. His 1971 genre-bending Mass commissioned by Jackie Kennedy for the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington included both jazz swing, a rock band, and poignant, theatrical soliloquies about the challenges of religious faith.

His exploration of the successes and disappointments of 19th Century presidents, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, was an instant flop on Broadway for the bicentennial in 1976 (critics hated the book but loved the music), but the song “Take care of this house” has remained a patriotic staple through good times and bad.

In 1950 Peter Pan started as a Broadway play with Boris Karloff and Jean Arthur and a small amount of incidental music and five songs by Bernstein, much of which was cut. It didn’t find its place as a children’s musical until a half century later with a new recording and edition of the scores.

Candide also had a rough opening on Broadway in 1956 because of its book, and because its stylistic fit in between musical theater and opera (familiar in Europe as “operetta”) didn’t find its footing in New York until its revival two decades later with a cast of opera singers. It has since become a staple on both theatrical and operatic stages.

Bernstein’s On the Town was his first successful Broadway musical, coming in 1944 shortly after the astounding success of his conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic at the age of only 25 and the premier of his Symphony No. 1, Jeremiah with the Pittsburg Symphony. He was dissuaded from further composing for musical theater by his mentor Serge Koussevitsky, who wanted him to stick to more “serious” genres. He didn’t return to writing for the stage until 1953, with his second successful musical, Wonderful Town (with Betty Comden and Adolph Green). A string of landmark Broadway shows were to follow.

West Side Story began as a modern reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with the title “East Side Story” centered around a conflict between Irish Catholics and Lower East Side Jews. But that plan gave way to a move west to Los Angeles and its Chicano turf wars, until finally settling in the Manhattan neighborhood between the Puerto Rican “Sharks” and the Anglo “Jets” brought together by the love of Maria and Tony.

His critics couldn’t understand how someone who could re-introduce the symphonies of Gustav Mahler could also write a popular sensation like West Side Story. Perhaps what made Bernstein’s life and work so distinctively American was his own very particular yet complex cultural makeup and his instinctive passion for the variety of human experience that makes America the unique nation it is. The words of Walt Whitman could be applied directly to Bernstein: “I contain multitudes!”   - Thomas Lloyd