★★★☆☆
At the start of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s finale to Radio 3’s Leonard Bernstein day, the conductor David Charles Abell was so eager to kickstart the overture to Candide that the piece’s sparkling jewels seemed to shake even before he had arrived on the podium. Perhaps at the back of his mind Abell had the less fizzy, less captivating Bernstein works to follow, two mementos of the protean musician’s burning desire to be rated primarily as a serious composer.
Numerous virtues, it’s true, crop up in the semi-violin concerto of 1954, the Serenade after Plato’s “Symposium”, pleasantly decorated here by the soloist Vadim Gluzman’s sinuous tones and dancing feet. There’s the melodic outpouring of the slow movement, the heart of this work’s reflections on Plato’s discussion of the nature of love. Textures throughout are disarmingly clear, unless Bernstein fudges them with rum-ti-tum percussive beats or a climactic fit of the tubular bells. Yet the athletic exertions of Abell’s team still couldn’t stop the work seeming overly dry and artificial — signs of a composer working too hard.
Then came Songfest of 1977, a celebratory setting of 12 American poems, doomed to be a concert rarity by the need to hire six vocal soloists. There could be other reasons too: the uneven musical invention, the lack of structural glue, generating a collapse into 12 violently eclectic songs strung out like washing on a line. Among the singers, not all clearly audible in the hall, the mezzo J’Nai Bridges usually delivered something extra, and the rest always showed spirit. Yet this paean to America’s diverse heritage stayed a well-meaning jumble, topped off with a feeble finale. Abell’s romping encore, at least, came to the rescue: America from West Side Story. Now that’s Bernstein on top form.