This new Virgin CD amounts to something like a fourfold commemoration, at least for local listeners.
First, conductor Andrew Litton made his Utah Symphony debut in 1987 with Leonard Bernstein's "Candide" Overture. Ditto pianist Jeffrey Kahane in 1989 with the same composer's "The Age of Anxiety." (In addition, he returns to the state this month for a recital Saturday, Sept. 14, at BYU.) Were that not enough, this week "The Age of Anxiety" figures prominently on Ballet West's fall-season opener, with new choreography by John Neumeier. (Jerome Robbins had a shot at it in 1950, for New York City Ballet.)And last there is Bernstein himself, one of whose many memorials this now becomes following his death last year at age 72. But it is not the older Bernstein recalled here so much as the one from the '40s and '50s, when the creative juices were in full flow.
Witness the exuberance of the "Candide" Overture, which races along merrily in early Bernstein fashion, even down to the push given "Glitter and Be Gay." (His own later recordings - including the new one on DG - are a bit more relaxed.)
Or the balletic snap of "Fancy Free," here more strongly profiled than on Leonard Slatkin's otherwise commendable Angel CD (now apparently out of print) and made all the more atmospheric by the inclusion of Billie Holiday's rendition of "Big Stuff," taken from the old Decca 78s on which Bernstein himself was the conductor. If I still prefer the pizazz of the latter's CBS recording, well, this is still the best non-Bernstein-conducted "Fancy Free" I know.
In "The Age of Anxiety," moreover, Litton may have surpassed the composer himself.
Certainly this is a more polished rendition, and more atmospherically recorded, than either of Bernstein's two stereo-era recordings of the score. (The last, with pianist Lukas Foss, currently survives on DG 415964-2.) It is also more subtly shaded, something that extends to the piano part, to which Kahane brings greater sparkle and poetry, balancing all its elements from the baroque passacaglia that opens "The Seven Stages" to the wonderfully jazzy "Masque" (here for once up to tempo).
That is not easily done in a work in which optimism and pessimism are yoked as uneasily as they are in life. And there is much to be said for the moodiness and toughness Foss occasionally brings to the writing. Likewise the added grandeur Bernstein himself finds in the Epilogue.
On the other hand what Litton and Kahane offer is essentially a young man's view of the score, without compromising its depth or ambivalence. As sort of a downbeat extension of the "Fancy Free" scenario (both feature three men in a bar) it also makes an interesting discmate to that work - a search for fun vs. a search for meaning, as it were. Which, if one thinks about it, is pretty much what "Candide" is all about, too. But in the Overture, as in youth, the emphasis is decidedly on the former.