Chichester Psalms

Bernstein is quite an enigma. He has been lovingly accused of having too many talents, for not only was he a superb composer, but also a tremendously important conductor, a fine pianist, and an influential music educator. However, many American composers consider his career something of a disappointment. During his long tenure as director of the New York Philharmonic, unquestionably the most influential position any American composer has yet held, Bernstein conducted 939 concerts, but gave only 36 world premieres. He was no special advocate for New Music or American Music, not even if it was relatively conservative. Nor was his career as a composer spotless, in spite of such tremendously popular works as West Side Story. At one point he took a sabbatical from the Philharmonic for a year, supposedly to learn and compose using the twelve-tone system of Arnold Schoenberg, which had become tremendously important at that time; but he abandoned the work and instead created Chichester Psalms, including some music which he'd originally composed but ultimately omitted for West Side Story. He once called Chichester Psalms "the most Bb-majorish tonal piece I've ever written." Even this comment displays Bernstein's discomfort with New Music, for it is simply untrue. Chichester Psalms is a sophisticated piece that has some quite dissonant counterpoint, bitonality, and oddly modulating tonal passages. Listen, for example, to the prologue of the third movement, and you will note that there is nothing Bb majorish about it.

Beautifully complemented by Chichester Psalms is the suite from the film On the Waterfront, which contains some of Bernstein's most interesting and least recognized music. The suite from the film's score includes some music cut by the director, giving us a chance to hear even more than the film's audience does. It's Bernstein at his best, showing how spiky, angular and dissonant music can blend with more traditional elements in a totally convincing and attractive whole--sort of a get-together at a blues club between Aaron Copland, Claude Debussy, and George Gershwin.

Although the performances are quite good and the music quintessential Bernstein, my overall impression of this disc was of some disappointment. It's very short, barely making 49 minutes, and here is where the Naxos plan fails the individual product. Naxos seeks to sell a piece only in a single recording, so that they don't end up competing with themselves by selling fifteen different orchestras playing Beethoven's Fifth, for example. They've already come out with some of Bernstein's orchestral pieces, such as the Overture to Candide (in a disappointing rendition) and perhaps they were unable to find something else to complement these works, but the listener is substantially short-changed. Furthermore, the concert order doesn't display the pieces at their best. The meatiest pieces, On the Waterfront and Chichester Psalms, come first, and the dances from On the Town, the lightest and most brief at only a little over 10 minutes for all three pieces, seem like an odd appendage--as if they are an encore for a program that is far too brief to deserve one. Overall, not the bargain some Naxos recordings are.