Bernstein on Broadway: Carla Huhtanen (soprano); Sally Burgess (mezzo); Jamie MacDougall (tenor) Orchestra of Welsh National Opera / Carl Davis (conductor), Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 06.06.07 (GPu)

Music from On the Town, Candide, Wonderful Town, Mass, Trouble in Tahiti, Fancy Free, On the Water Front, West Side Story, and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Even in so necessarily selective an anthology as made up this conspectus of (mostly) Bernstein’s work for the musical theatre, one could not fail to be impressed both by the sheer quality of so much of the writing and by the ease with which Bernstein the musical magpie adopts a great variety of musical idioms. In Candide the Old Lady sings “I Am Easily Assimilated” (a piece well-performed here by Sally Burgess). Bernstein might have said of himself “How Easily I Assimilate”. And how well! Jazz, Western Classical, Viennese Operetta, Broadway Musical, several varieties of Latin music, Gilbert and Sullivan, French impressionism – it all gets ‘assimilated’, it all gets brilliantly recycled, juxtaposed, deconstructed and reconstructed, and it all comes out as echt Bernstein.

Carl Davis has put together a richly entertaining programme, presented in essentially chronological order (with a few digressions in the interest of balance), from On the Town (1944) to that unfortunate flop 1600 Pennsyvania Avenue (1976). This was the first night of the tour of the show; it was, deservedly, much enjoyed by the audience in Cardiff and deserves to find many listeners at future dates. Perhaps the music making lacked the sheer boldness of the very best American performances of this material, but any reservations were minor ones. In the Orchestra  of the Welsh National Opera Davis was working with an orchestra which – as it has often demonstrated – has a well-developed sense of the theatrical. Maybe the rhythms were just a little lacking in sharpness right at the beginning of the evening (in the Overture to Candide) but things soon became altogether tighter and they played with both incisiveness and tenderness in orchestral pieces such as the ‘Pas de Deux’ from On The Town (especially beautiful), the ‘Galop’ and ‘Danzon’ from Fancy Free and, especially, the ‘Love theme’ from On The Water Front, its opening passages ravishingly played on harp and clarinet, succeeded by rich orchestral textures beautifully sculpted and balanced.

Davis was well served by his soloists. Canadian soprano Carla Huhtanen has had operatic successes which range from Gershwin (Daisy Park in Lady Be Good at La Fenice) to Rossini (Lisette in La Gazetta at Garsington). She has previously sung the role of Cunnegond (in Candide), both in Malta and at the Barbican. Her dazzling virtuosity in ‘Glitter and Be Gay’ was the highlight of the evening, the voice control quite superb, the interpretative familiarity and understanding very evident. Her interplay with Sally Burgess in ‘America’ and with Jamie MacDougall in the love duets from West Side Story suggested a young singer with many of the gifts required on the operatic stage. She made a very favourable impression, and I hope to hear a good deal more of her.

Sally Burgess is a more familiar figure to British audiences, and she was never less than assured and accomplished here, perhaps especially in the comic numbers such as ‘I Can Cook’ (from On The Town) and the aforementioned ‘I Am Easily Assimilated’. She brought a weight of stage experience, intelligently applied, to everything that she did.

Jamie MacDougall has an attractive light tenor voice; some will have encountered him as part of the group Caledon: Scotland’s Three Tenors; others may have heard his contributions to the recording of Haydn’s Folksong arrangements, with the Haydn Trio Eisenstadt, on Brilliant CDs. In this Bernstein programme he gave a good account of ‘Maria’, resisting most of the temptations to excess, and coped well with the very difficult ‘I Go On’ from the Mass, a very exposed piece which he survived rather netter than some more famous tenors I have heard attempt it. He worked especially well with Huhtanen in duets such as ‘Tonight’ and ‘One Hand, One Heart’ from West Side Story.

From what has already been said, it will be clear that this programme was not short on well-established ‘hits’. But Davis had also found room for some far less familiar items. Indeed he closed the ‘official’ part of the programme (before giving us ‘America’ as an encore) with one of them. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (a musical account of the establishment of the White House and its residents in the nineteenth century), with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, lasted only seven performances in 1976. From the wreckage (some of it assembled in the posthumous A White house Cantata, put together by family and associates) the finest piece, but certainly not overfamiliar, is ‘Take Care of This House’, which Davis offered as a kind of valedictory blessing on the Millennium Centre itself. A touching performance illustrated something (not that one evening could even begin to hint at the full extent of it) of Bernstein’s range, immense even if one considers only his work for the musical theatre.

A thoroughly enjoyable evening, a touring show that deserves to do well. An evening which whetted the appetite to hear more of these pieces in their entirety – and threw a revealing light on the humdrum stuff which makes up some of our contemporary musicals.

 

Glyn Pursglove