When West Side Story premiered in 1957, Bernstein was at the height of his powers. Following his dramatic last-minute replacement for an ailing Bruno Walter at the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1943, he rapidly rose to fame as maestro, composer, and ever-present musical personality. As a musical educator, he had no peer. His televised Young People’s Concerts introduced thousands to classical music—his image, voice, and charisma effortlessly turned something ostensibly abstract and remote into something vital and hip through the sheer force of personality.
Like the Tchaikovsky work on this program, West Side Story is a musical depiction of the Romeo and Juliet story, in this case a modern version in which a tenement staircase becomes the setting for the balcony scene, urban gangs enact the swordfights, and racial hatred is the tragic force that destroys the young lovers. Bernstein began discussing ideas for the work with librettist Arthur Laurents and choreographer Jerome Robbins in 1949, originally planning to call it East Side Story—the star-crossed lovers being a Jewish girl and a Catholic boy—then changed the concept to involve rival street gangs on the Upper West Side, whites versus Puerto Ricans. For his lyricist, he hired a young Stephen Sondheim, who went on to launch his own musical theater revolution.
The premiere changed music theater history, and the superb Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins film version from 1961 kept it alive, allowing audiences to get accustomed to its audacity and unsettling urban realism. (The recent Steven Spielberg version conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, himself a Bernstein aficionado, has brought it to yet another generation.) The year the film appeared, the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story were presented at Carnegie Hall in a valentine for Leonard Bernstein, who had just signed on for seven more years at the New York Philharmonic. Bernstein’s assemblage of dances, its structure chosen for musical rather than plot reasons, gave audiences a way to sample the powerful orchestral music on its own. None other than Stephen Sondheim said he believed the strongest aspect of West Side Story was the dance music—not the songs, even though he wrote the lyrics—because the dances tell the story through purely musical means: “More happens in terms of the plot of the show than almost any musical … and with less dialogue.”
The score, both in its original form and purely orchestral version, is an ingenious fusion of European and American stage elements: leitmotifs, classical polyphony, and intricate ensembles, yoked with Latin and African American jazz syncopations and timbres. It is the culmination of Bernstein’s attempt to create a dynamic new species of musical theater in works such as On the Town, Wonderful Town, and Candide. At the Carnegie Hall premiere, the Symphonic Dances were presented with the following program note elucidating its narrative structure:
“Prologue: The growing rivalry between two teenage gangs, the Jets and Sharks.
Somewhere: In a visionary dance sequence, the two gangs are united in friendship.
Scherzo: In the same dream, they break through the city walls, and suddenly find themselves in a world of space, air, and sun.
Mambo: Reality again; competitive dance between the gangs.
Cha-Cha: The star-crossed lovers see each other for the first time and dance together.
Meeting Scene: Music accompanies their first spoken words.
Cool Fugue: An elaborate dance sequence in which the Jets practice controlling their hostility.
Rumble: Climactic gang battle during which the two gang leaders are killed.
Finale: Love music developing into a processional, which recalls, in tragic reality, the vision of ‘Somewhere.’”
Bernstein oversaw the orchestrations of Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, who had orchestrated the film. Not surprisingly, the orchestra is huge and colorful, with an elaborate percussion section. The work sounds sprawling and spontaneous but is tightly interconnected by concise motifs—the beginning notes of the ravishing song “Maria” for example, which permeate the piece. It opens with the swaggering music of the Jets and Sharks, increasing in intensity and speeding up dangerously before melting into the tenderness and longing of “Somewhere,” first sung by strings, then brass, the somber ending prefiguring the finale. The Scherzo and Mambo begin delicately, then become exuberant and finally violent, climaxing with screaming brass. In the Cha-Cha (Bernstein’s riff on a Cuban form) and Meeting Scene, we get music of exquisite charm, followed by a “cool” fugue, displaying Bernstein’s ability to combine classical structure with jazzy rhythm, and the fatal Rumble. An ethereal version of the love music opens the finale, leading to a sad processional and a series of quiet bitonal chords, ending the Symphonic Dances on a note of haunting beauty.
Jasmine Arielle Barnes is a promising young composer and vocalist whose works have been performed worldwide. She is a multifaceted composer who embraces a variety of genres, formats, and instrumentations, with a specialty of writing for the voice. She recently won a Capital Emmy for Diversity/Equity/Inclusion–Long Form Content for the Maryland Public Television documentary film Artworks: Dreamer, which featured her piece Portraits: Douglass & Tubman.
Barnes is currently a composer-in-residence at American Lyric Theater, and previously served as a composer fellow at Chautauqua Opera Company and composer-in-residence with All Classical Radio in Portland, Oregon. Her work is in high demand, with recent commissions from respected institutions throughout the country that include Washington National Opera (for the Kennedy Center’s 50th anniversary), Bare Opera, Resonance Ensemble, Tapestry Choir, City Works in Cleveland, Lyric Fest Philadelphia, Baltimore Choral Arts Society, Burleigh Music Festival, Symphony Number One, Baltimore Musicales, and The Voic(ed) Project, among others.
Engagements in the 2022–2023 season included the world premiere of Plumshuga, an arrangement of spirituals commissioned by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and performed at Carnegie Hall by Karen Slack and Will Liverman; a composition for Lawrence Brownlee’s recital tour Rising; and a new song cycle commissioned by world-renowned tenor Russell Thomas that was performed at Los Angeles Opera. Last season, her works had world premieres by Third Practice, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Apollo Chamber Players, and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. Her 10-minute opera The Late Walk, commissioned by Bare Opera as a part of the Decameron Opera Coalition, has been archived in the Library of Congress.
Barnes is the former head of compositional studies and jazz voice studies at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Morgan State University in Baltimore, where she studied composition under Dr. James Lee III. Her new opera, She Who Dared with a libretto by Deborah Mouton, will have its world premiere at Chicago Opera Theater in spring 2025.
KINSFOLKNEM is a celebration of family and extended family gathering. The piece highlights the sound world of places and themes surrounding Black family gatherings. The first movement, “The Sunday Dinner,” showcases themes of gospel idioms much like the second movement, “The Repast.” The third and last movement, “The Reunion,” is a final celebration of the sort. It features the sound world of a Black cookout.
—Jasmine Barnes
With its gorgeous love theme, powerful Montague-Capulet music, and vivid orchestration, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet has always been one of the most popular of the many musical settings of Shakespeare’s play. Romeo and Juliet is early Shakespeare—and it is an early work for Tchaikovsky as well—but by the time Tchaikovsky added the final edits, he was a seasoned composer. The composition process became tangled in the kind of self-doubt and rebooting that bedeviled him throughout his career.
Tchaikovsky met the Russian nationalist group the Mighty Five (Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui, Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Balakirev) in his late 20s, but he never allied himself officially with them; he was always an outsider, a proud Russian but also a refined cosmopolitan, confident in his larger vision but painfully insecure in his execution of it. Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modest, noted that the composer’s relationship with the Mighty Five resembled “those between two friendly neighboring states—cautiously prepared to meet on common ground, but jealously guarding their separate interests.”
In 1869, Mily Balakirev, the guru of the Five, suggested Tchaikovsky undertake a Romeo and Juliet overture and sent him a micro-managing outline. The timing was more propitious than Balakirev could have known: Tchaikovsky, still unsure of his sexuality, was infatuated with the singer Désirée Artôt, who rejected him (mercifully, as it turned out), projecting his yearning and anxiety into the Romeo and Juliet music. He tried to follow Balakirev’s requirements, but Balakirev (who was never as successful a composer as Tchaikovsky) panned much of the piece, which Tchaikovsky kept reshaping, renaming it a “Fantasy Overture” in a final 1880 revision.
In the most famous Romeo and Juliet symphonic pieces—those by Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, and Prokofiev—all three composers created a love theme as memorable as anything in their careers. Tchaikovsky’s is by far the most quoted, in popular as well as highbrow culture, a sensuous idea initially sung by the English horn that soars, falls back on itself, and swoons upward all over again. Shakespeare is clearly on the side of the young lovers and so is Tchaikovsky, as reflected in the rapture of this theme in contrast to the dark chaos of the Montague-Capulet music, where Tchaikovsky fully earned the “barbarous” title often hurled at him by critics.
Though Tchaikovsky was a Romantic, he often followed Classical structures. Here he uses his own loose variation on sonata form rather than depicting the Romeo and Juliet story chronologically. Bookended by a haunting, chorale-like prelude and postlude depicting Friar Laurence, the piece launches ferociously into a first theme group that represents the destructive tribalism of the Montague and Capulet families, with jagged motifs and irregular rhythms, followed by the luscious love theme. This melody surges back in the recapitulation, more passionately than ever, only to be crushed by the first subject, which is now more violent, a heartbreaking sequence that demonstrates how music (as we see in the Bernstein version of Romeo and Juliet on this program) can enact drama without words. The lovers’ melody appears at the end as a ghostly dirge for strings and timpani, then floats back one more time as an angelic fragment before a fateful final chord.
In Stravinsky’s 1962 essay “The Firebird’s First Flight,” the composer had some hard and humorous words to say about the 1910 ballet score that propelled him to fame as a young man. To the 80-year-old composer, who had long before succumbed to neoclassicism, the work seemed overlong, overwrought, and lacking in “real musical invention.” Commenting on the live horses trotted out by Sergei Diaghilev at the Paris premiere, Stravinsky wrote that “one of them, a better critic than actor, left a malodorous calling card.” Even the positive reaction of Ravel, who attended the Paris premiere, seems suspect: “The Parisian audience wanted a taste of the avant-garde, and The Firebird was just that. To this explanation I would add that The Firebird belongs to the styles of its time, and that while it is more vigorous than most of the music of the period, it is also not too original—good conditions for a success.”
There were a few aspects of the work that continued to delight Stravinsky in his old age: He still liked the innovative natural-harmonic string glissando “which the bass chord touches off like a Catherine wheel,” and he was still fond of the rhythmic irregularities in the finale and the intervallic ones in the Introduction and Kashchei sections: “When, one day in the future, some poor doctoral candidate sifts my early works for their ‘serial tendencies,’ this sort of thing will, I suppose, rate as an ur-example.”
For most of us, Stravinsky’s retrospective grumblings are swept away by the splendor and magic of the music. Of the many transitional works from the period—Mahler’s symphonies, Scriabin’s tone poems, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Gurre-Lieder—The Firebird retains what is perhaps the most endearing freshness and vital sense of possibility. It is in the “twilight of Romanticism” genre and quotes folk songs from Rimsky-Korsakov’s collection, but it also points the way irresistibly forward. The exhilarating violence of the Infernal Dance, the ominous bass rumblings in the Introduction, the breathless shimmer of strings at the beginning of the Finale, and the granitic blocks of sound at the end all have the distinctive Stravinsky sound and personality—a tantalizing forecast of Pétrouchka and The Rite of Spring. Even the more Rimsky-Korsakovian moments, such as the dream-like Lullaby, seem part of a new context.
To remedy what he considered to be the “wastefully large” orchestra of the original ballet score and the first suite from late 1910, Stravinsky composed two pared down suites (“criticisms stronger than words,” as he called them), one in 1919—which we hear on this evening’s program—and the other in 1945. Nevertheless, as the singer-journalist Bill Zakariasen once pointed out, it is only in the opulent uncut version that The Firebird stands as “the one great bridge between Romanticism and modernism in Russian music.”
—Jack Sullivan