GRAMOPHONE Review: Bernstein Candide – Soloists, London Symphony Orchestra/Alsop

Absence doesn’t make the heart grow any fonder of this performance. I heard (and saw) it live back in 2018 and it was in so many ways a mirror image of what the composer himself tried to achieve back in 1989, a year before we lost him. He strove to present his bountiful score in its absolute entirety (the triumphant John Mauceri edition for Scottish Opera) but conspicuously bigger and starrier than ever before. His reading was cursed with an air of self-importance and was slow, very slow. Opera stars like June Anderson and Christa Ludwig underlined its ‘legitimacy’ and a dazzlingly capricious and witty score became weighed down with strenuous attempts to elevate it into something it was not.

Candide is not ‘an operetta’; it’s a Broadway show masquerading as an operetta – therein lies its genius. And sadly Marin Alsop seems bent on picking up where her mentor left off. You can hear it immediately in that best of all possible Overtures where an air of racy recklessness (as befitting a picaresque comedy) is sacrificed to something grander and overly well-upholstered. But at least Lenny gave us the entire score in something approaching the order and form in which it was first conceived. It would, of course, take more pages than are available in this entire magazine to chronicle the countless rewrites and many cooks brought in to, as it were, fix the broth (that is, Lillian Hellman’s verbose book). But whatever the solutions proffered, Dr Pangloss acting as an all-purpose master of ceremonies (a thinly disguised Voltaire) would seem to do the trick.

Alsop uses an edition by Lonny Price (the original Charley in Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along) which combines a wordy (though undeniably witty) narration but with the addition of so much unnecessary dialogue as to make even this epic score seem thinly spread. With the exception of Thomas Allen as Pangloss/Narrator the dialogue is laboriously over-egged in a succession of funny voices and dubious foreign accents making for jokes that don’t so much land as crash-land. Worse still, Price has adopted aspects of the discredited Hal Prince version which unforgivably excises Candide’s sensational eleven o’clock number ‘Nothing More Than This’. It broke Lenny’s heart that his self-confessed ‘Puccini aria’ became a casualty of the original producer’s desire to move the final scene on. There is no excuse for ever excluding it now.

So, a non-starter, I’m afraid. Alsop’s Candide – Leonardo Capalbo – sounds older than he looks with his wide vibrato and somewhat ‘arch’ mannerisms. The youthful purity of the writing is nowhere. His Cunegonde – Jane Archibald – can deliver the coloratura with bells on but like June Anderson she has no idea how to nail the irony of ‘Glitter and Be Gay’ and sounds embarrassed and embarrassing in the melodrama. Anne Sofie von Otter makes a fist of the Old Lady’s ‘assimilation’ with a fine line in half-

baked Spanish but using the entire male voice contingent of the LSO Chorus as her backing group is frankly ludicrous.

Highlights are the way to go for home listening. The Original Broadway Cast (with Barbara Cook and Robert Rounseville) is priceless and surely closest to the original concept – though you don’t get ‘Nothing More Than This – but the Scottish Opera Highlights on Jay Records is a viable alternative and does include the precious eleven o’clock number.