Leonard Bernstein season at Southbank Centre in London
(August 2009)
Conductor Marin Alsop curates a season-long celebration of Leonard Bernstein at the Southbank Centre in London, presenting varied facets of his musical life as composer, conductor and educator.The nine-month Bernstein Project runs throughout the 2009-10 season, launched on 20 September with a day of events at the Southbank Centre and culminating in two performances of Mass on 10 and 11 July 2010. Leonard Bernstein's Mass has proved a perfect work for large-scale community-based events, and the London performances will feature a specially formed Mass Orchestra, singers from the Southbank Centre's Voicelab and young voices, dancers and musicians from Lambeth brought together in a major outreach programme running between February and July.
Other events programmed in the Bernstein Project include an examination of Mozart's Symphony No.40 with the Orchestra of the Age of Englightenment following the model of Bernstein's Discovery Concerts (5 Dec), a Bernstein on Broadway concert (7 Apr 2010), the Auden-inspired symphony-concerto The Age of Anxiety played by Nicolas Hodges and the London Philharmonic Orchestra (21 Apr), a performance of Mahler's Symphony No.2 as championed by Bernstein (9 May), and five weekends of free foyer events centred around West Side Story.
Visit the Southbank Centre website.
Marin Alsop led a similar Mass-based project in the USA last year, which was widely acclaimed and led to a new recording just released on the Naxos label (8.559622/3), selected as Disc of the Month in the September issue of Gramophone. Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony were joined by Jubilant Sykes - according to Gramophone "the best of all possible Celebrants" - and hosts of young Baltimore performers. Performances also took place in New York's Carnegie Hall as part of the city-wide celebrations of the composer's 90th anniversary, and at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights with 250 New York schoolchildren.
Bernstein's Mass, which he conceived as "a theatre piece for singers, players and dancers" for the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington, is increasingly viewed as the most personal of the composer's large-scale works. As Gramophone noted with regard to the new Naxos recording: "The stage action was Bernstein's parable for 1970s America: an America fighting a controversial war, ravaged by political and racial conflict, and the assassination of anybody who was a force for good. To portray a society in freefall, Bernstein illuminates all its music... tonality gets refracted through tone-rows and clusters. Over this shifting abstraction, Bernstein layers church music, blues, even a brief quote from Beethoven... This new recording of Mass is a powerful depiction of a crisis of faith but not in the work... Alsop's answer is vital and affirmative. No more, surely, will Mass be seen as the composer's neglected child."
> Further information on Work: Mass (full version)
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