Bernstein – Overture to Candide

No other American classical musician has had an impact to rival Leonard Bernstein’s. As the host of televised Young People’s Concerts, which ran intermittently from 1958 to 1972, he educated an entire generation of music lovers. His West Side Story has permeated the national culture as few musicals have. As a conductor, he made hundreds of recordings, many of which continue be re-issued in new compact disc editions a dozen years after his death. Through collaborating with Europe’s great orchestras, he symbolically legitimized America’s presentation of music by German, French, or Russian masters in its own concert halls. He created some important works for the concert hall, including three symphonies, and while the overall atmosphere of these compositions is “appropriately” formal, they are also infused with the spirit of jazz, which was central to Bernstein’s life throughout his career. His excesses in both his public and private lives made him a controversial figure, but no one could deny his energy, enthusiasm, and charisma.

In the mid-1950s, Bernstein was enjoying a significant conducting career, but was probably best known (at least in the United States) as a Broadway composer. This was destined to change in 1958, when he began his eleven-year term as music director of the New York Philharmonic and cut back on his time spent composing. Just two years before accepting that appointment, however, he created one of his finest works in Candide. The show, based on Voltaire’s satirical novel of 1759, has never secured the following enjoyed by West Side Story, which came the following year. The overture, however, which combines the composer’s sense of humor with his gift for lush melodic writing, is Bernstein’s most popular work in the concert hall.

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2002-03 PCO repertoire