The celebrated conductor, composer, and educator Leonard Bernstein’s 100th birthday would have been August 25, 2019. Countless celebrations of this anniversary have taken place around the globe this past year, and 45^th Parallel Universe is proud to join that celebration with a program of vocal and chamber works that cover nearly the entire range of his compositional career.

Bernstein was a member of the Class of 1939 at the elite Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied piano, conducting, and orchestration. That year, he heard word of a new summer musical institute being started by conductor Serge Koussevitsky at the newly-formed Tanglewood Festival in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. He was invited to take part in its inaugural year, 1940. Bernstein was just 22 years of age.

During my college years I was fortunate enough to be a Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center for two summers. It’s fair to say that the ghost of Lenny suffused the atmosphere of that place. He taught and performed at Tanglewood for fifty years, working with generations of composers, conductors, and performers over that time. Nearly every concert featured a work of his, as well as of his friends and colleagues from that time, including Aaron Copland and Lukas Foss. During one of my summers, the Leonard Bernstein Memorial Concert featured Itzhak Perlman playing his Serenade, and pianist Leon Fleischer premiering a Piano Concerto for Left Hand by Lukas Foss (subtitled “From L.F. for L.F.”). It was a heady experience, especially for a musician whose early immersions in classical recordings included works either written by, or conducted by (or both) Lenny.

Bernstein’s first published work of chamber music (and the opening work on our upcoming concert) dates from his student years at Curtis, his 1937 Piano Trio. It immediately displays the jazz-influenced style that would become his hallmark as a composer. This music is at once both accessible and sophisticated, and not lacking in humor. The second movement, Tempo di marcia, shows this off to great effect.

Bernstein is known first as a conductor, second as a composer, and thirdly as a pianist. His recording of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is a landmark interpretation. He composed several pieces for one and two pianos which are not very well-known outside of the piano world, and two of these will be presented on the concert as well, played by the 20 Digitus Duo - pianists Maria Garcia and Momoko Muramatsu. His Seven Anniversaries (1943) commemorates friends, mentors, and colleagues with intimate solo vignettes. The piano duo Bridal Suite (1960) was written as a wedding present for lyricist Adolph Green and actress Phyllis Newman. The title was a play on the location (a room at a hotel) and the form of the piece (a musical suite), and was meant for the newlyweds to play themselves. The opening Prelude evokes Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, quotes a tune from the Comden-Green-Styne musical Bells Are Ringing, and then slyly quotes from Strauss’ Don Juan in its coda.

Bernstein also loved writing for and working with singers, and wrote a number of concert works that featured vocalists, as well as his most well-known work, the smash musical West Side Story. He wrote a series of song cycles, selections from which are performed on this program. I Hate Music (1943) is perhaps one of the most well-known, having been written for a friend of Bernstein’s who suffered through marathons of his coaching singers for performances at his apartment in New York, and whose cry became the title of this song.

The concert closes with another of Bernstein’s early chamber works, his Clarinet Sonata (1942). It is an evocative and beautiful work that shows off the clarinet and piano to maximum effect, but which also maintains the lyricism and cross-genre appeal that would characterize Bernstein’s music for the remainder of his career. Played by clarinetist James Shields and pianist Maria Garcia, it’s one of my favorite instrumental pieces of Bernstein’s, and serves as a perfect closer to what promises to be a memorable evening of music.

Charles Noble
Assistant Principal Viola, Oregon Symphony