GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – August 2018
They say we can’t get enough of our heroes – but I am seriously wondering if at this time next when someone mentions the name Leonard Bernstein my response might be: “Who?” I jest, of course. I can’t think of a musical figure who has proved more important to me personally – but then, of course, that is hardly a well-kept secret. The great man looms larger than life in this issue including my own observations on his compositions and their increasing presence amidst the core repertoire – but reading my colleague Rob Cowan’s wonderfully comprehensive assessment of Bernstein’s conducting and recording career I was particularly struck by the parallels he drew with the great Wilhelm Furtwangler.
Both were, of course, highly subjective interpreters, both approached other composer’s music as they might their own. Bernstein often said that he adopted “composerly” instincts on the podium, that he could gauge the success or other wise of a performance by the extent to which he felt he was composing the piece himself as he went along. Indeed there were times when watching him shape a phrase or highlight an orchestral effect where one might almost imagine a thought-bubble emerging with the words “Gosh, wish I’d thought of that.”
Though Bernstein’s skills as a conductor and, more importantly, a communicator were like Furtwangler highly organic, the fruit of intensive study and great familiarity with the music, few lived “in the moment” as he did. And in the moment he could take orchestras and audiences deeper into a piece than all the preparation in the world can have predicted. This led, as Rob has suggested, to some boldly expansive tempi some of which proved problematic when reproduced time and again in a recording. His famously personal live account of the Tchaikovsky Pathetique culminates in a final adagio significantly longer than any on disc by virtue of searching silences and rubatos that only a very special collusion between conductor and players (and audience) could achieve. I remember asking one or two New York Philharmonic string players if they recalled those live performances as being especially slow? Not at all, they said – in the moment and under Bernstein’s spell it took as long as it took.
There’s a very particular kind of musical telepathy involved in achieving the kind of interpretative freedom and flexibility that Bernstein did. Spiritual emanations and his legendary body language were always key – and to those who wrongly (in my view) dismissed his podium antics as surplus to requirements the acid test always came down to whether or not you were hearing what you were seeing. In Bernstein’s case there was never any doubt. His face and body language, his ability to communicate the reasons for the notes, the shape of a beautiful phrase, the characterisation of a moment, these were things which went way beyond a commanding stick technique and an acute ear for balance and detail into the realms of truly communicating feeling. And in that regard, and taking just one composer, one really could go so far as to say that Bernstein became or was Mahler.
Rob Cowan believes Bernstein’s 1961 recording of Mahler’s Third Symphony with the New York Philharmonic to be one of the finest Mahler performances in half a century. I’ll go further and suggest that the final Adagio has never been equalled in my experience. It remains a lasting testament to what happens when great music and an inspirational interpreter find each other.
