A Joyful Linkage

It is hard to believe that George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein never knew each other. They seem--in their eclecticism, in their heritage, in their talent, in their Americanness--so alike. They were born only 20 years apart. Bernstein’s adoring championship of Gershwin is legendary.

But Gershwin died in Beverly Hills the summer of 1937, while the 19-year-old Bernstein was still a student at Harvard. That summer Bernstein worked as a music counselor at a camp near Tanglewood. On hearing of Gershwin’s death, he interrupted lunch in the mess hall, played Gershwin’s Prelude No. 2, and later said that at that moment he felt he was Gershwin.

Bernstein also thought he was a lot of other composers--Mahler, for instance, when he conducted the symphonies. And the differences between Bernstein and Gershwin can be more interesting than the similarities. And John Mauceri understood the contrasts well in his program with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra Tuesday night. The Hollywood Bowl tribute to both composers appropriately fell between Bernstein’s 80th birthday last month and Gershwin’s upcoming 100th in three weeks.

What ties Bernstein’s and Gershwin’s music together more than their shared eclecticism is, I think, its common root in song. But they came at it from opposite ends. Gershwin used his genius for writing popular song as an entree into classical music; Bernstein was the classical musician who worked backward into popular song. Ultimately, though, it all got pretty mixed up in both men.

That mix-up is no where more apparent than in Bernstein’s two religious works on the first half of the program. In “Chichester Psalms,” written in 1965 for the Chichester Cathedral in England, Bernstein cannibalized music he had intended for very different purposes--songs for a projected musical based on Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” and some rejected bits of “West Side Story.” He searched for Hebrew Psalm texts that would fit the rhythms and made pretty good matches in his setting for chorus, orchestra and boy soprano.

The matches can be a little strange though. Nations rage and kings take counsel against the Lord like Jets and Sharks. The joyful noise unto the Lord is sybaritic beyond all churchly decorum (bongos in the cathedral!), and the sweetness of the boy soprano solo is downright decadent. And yet it is fabulous synthesis, tied together as it is by Bernstein’s irresistible personality and musical sophistication.

The “Mass” is Bernstein’s famous mess. Written for the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 1971, as a kind of mystery play, eclectic to a fault (rock here, blues there, Broadway or 12-tone elsewhere), a Mass as Jewish and Buddhist as it is Catholic, it managed to alienate just about everybody, including the ‘60s generation who felt co-opted.

But time has been kind to “Mass.” There is nothing to be done about Stephen Schwartz’s horrid lyrics or the timid rock elements (though now they seem more dated than dopey), but the musical eclecticism is comfortable to Postmodern sensibilities and the chances it takes and the icons it crumbles, theatrically and musically, have come to seem quite bold. Moreover, this is a wartime (Vietnam) mass, and it acknowledges the horror and the doubt of its time as well as the air of celebration. Mauceri undercut some of that boldness with his 25-minute selection of excerpts; it was too integrated, but enough was available to get the flavor.

Gershwin’s Concerto in F, after intermission, felt as if it were from a different world, and it was. Written almost a half-century earlier than the Bernstein, it is an uneasy classical synthesis. Gershwin’s struggle with classical form has been hashed over for ages, and the concerto has never been especially popular because of that. But there are gems in this score, wondrous gems of rich and mature Gershwin that sound all the fresher for not being over-exposed.

Mauceri and his orchestra served all this music well. Bernstein is vital to him and he communicated that. The boy soprano, Theo Lebow, sang Psalm 23 with melting beauty; baritone Nathan Gunn was an authoritative celebrant in “Mass”; the Los Angeles Master Chorale was incisive in both. British pianist Peter Donohoe commanded the Concerto in F.