100 Doses of Royal Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein never hid his light under a bushel, nor did Columbia/CBS, which enshrined on recordings what seemed like every exhalation of his decade-long stewardship of the New York Philharmonic in the ‘60s.

His huge discography, packaged and repackaged in the past, is given yet another go-round by Sony Classical, heir to the CBS catalogue. The promotional gimmick for this massive recycling--100 mid-priced releases, including welcome, relative esoterica in addition to the usual greatest hits--is the cover art: watercolors by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, with part of the proceeds from the sale of the discs earmarked for charities with which Prince Charles is involved.

“The Royal Edition,” as it’s called, is being released alphabetically by composer, which places some long-unavailable Bartok in the leadoff position.

Volume 1 (Sony 47510) pairs the Concerto for Orchestra and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Volume 2 (47511, two discs) offers the Second and Third Piano Concertos, with Philippe Entremont the peppy soloist; the Second Violin Concerto and the two Rhapsodies, all with Isaac Stern in commanding form, and the Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion, zestfully presented by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale with the Philharmonic’s celebrated battery of the time, led by timpanist Saul Goodman.

While some listeners may be put off by sizable patches of rough orchestral execution, particularly in the solo piano concertos, Bernstein’s leadership communicates the intensity and sweep of live performances (which these are not) to a degree seldom achieved in studio recordings.

This initial offering also contains the nine Beethoven symphonies, as mixed a bag as a single interpreter of the canon has given us: from the sloppy dawdling of the “Pastoral” (with a crude Symphony No. 8, in Volume 6, 47517) to a swaggering, powerfully cohesive “Eroica” (with a burly First Symphony, in Volume 3, 47514).

Bernstein the friendly pedagogue, appealing at once to cognoscente and neophyte, offers a crystalline analysis, in German, French, English and Italian (on separate tracks), of the opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, which precedes a lovably lumbering performance of the entire symphony (47645). This valuable disc, inexplicably bereft of royal cover art, is set apart from the rest of the series as a budget-priced sampler.

Lacking Sony’s vast catalogue to exploit, RCA Victor has nevertheless come up with some treasure: performances by the young, not-as-yet-canonized Bernstein, brilliantly strutting his stuff during the 1940s.

This program (60915, mid-price) presents him as conductor of a pickup orchestra in a crackling, superbly executed (and recorded) “Billy the Kid” suite of Copland, and as protagonist in that composer’s very dissimilar Piano Sonata, presenting its tricky rhythms within a context of Romantic rubato and sonority. Bernstein reveals a score far less severe and forbidding than single-mindedly “modern” pianists would have us believe.

As bonuses, pianist-composer Bernstein offers his slight, charming “Seven Anniversaries,” while the conductor-composer leads the jazzy dances from “On the Town.”

Late Bernstein, after these examples of early and middle period, is on display in a Deutsche Grammophon concert (429 231) of works by American traditionalists: David del Tredici, whose tacky “Tattoo” (1986) is predicated on borrowings from Mahler and Paganini trashed by noise, and Ned Rorem, with his wanly elegiac 1984 Violin Concerto, its weaknesses all the more apparent in the blaze of soloist Gidon Kremer’s virtuosity.

Then too there is Bernstein’s own, none-too-coherent Concerto for Orchestra, which concludes--after some raucous aleatory doodles, a fussy homage to Bartok and an overlong sequence of characteristic L.B. Hebraic jazz--with a spare, simple Benediction, touchingly intoned by baritone Jose Eduardo Chama, which bears a family resemblance to the ethereal Psalm 23 setting in “Chichester Psalms.”

The New York Philharmonic is heard in the first two works, and the Israel Philharmonic, for whom it was conceived in 1986, plays the Concerto for Orchestra.

Bernstein admirers, particularly those who were turned on to classical music by his uninhibited way with a Romantic score, will prefer to remember him for the sort of big, throbbing, heart-on-sleeve--at times very slow, but with plenty of tension--interpretation preserved in one of his final recorded ventures, Sibelius’ First Symphony, taped live with the Vienna Philharmonic in February, 1990 (Deutsche Grammophon 435 351).