Leonard Bernstein - From Broadway to Lincoln Center
Program notes by Artistic Director Thomas Lloyd

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was perhaps the most iconic American musician of the 20th Century. He used his charismatic musicality to engage new listeners in both classical music and musical theater, not only through his many live performances and studio recordings, but through the still relatively new medium of (black-and-white!) television.

Known worldwide as a conductor, composer, and educator, the Choral Society’s program will focus on the incredible range of Bernstein’s intuitive way of writing for the human voice and on the central importance educating young people had throughout his career.

Our program will feature two young Bucks County soloists selected through our annual Voices of the Future competition. Our featured professional soloist, Elizabeth Shammash, will have just worked with these soloists at our April 19 Voices of the Future finalist master class at the James Lorah Home. 

We are also thrilled to include on this program the young voices of current students at our concert venue itself: the Select Choir of Lenape Middle School, directed by Jaime Rogers. This is a school that prioritizes music education, with music from Bernstein’s Peter Pan already in their repertory.

Bernstein played an indirect role in my own musical education through his longtime association with the summer classical training programs at Tanglewood, where I spent five summers, first as a bassoonist in the high school academy and later as a vocalist in the Fellowship program. He was a ubiquitous presence on campus, and I was lucky to sit in on numerous master classes and concerts with student soloists and ensembles, and sing with the Festival Chorus when he conducted the Boston Symphony. I remember especially how he was always alive “in the moment” and brought a theatrical pacing and sense of drama to everything he conducted.

Our featured soloist Elizabeth Shammash is not only a leading recitalist and concert singer, but is a prominent Jewish cantor in New York. She is deeply familiar not only with Bernstein’s extensive song literature but with the important connections throughout his music to his Jewish familial roots. The closing selection on this concert is the third movement of his Chichester Psalms, with its closing text from Psalm 133, “Hineh mah tov”-  Behold how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.

We’ve included a broad stylistic range of Bernstein’s vocal writing for both solo voice and for choir. His 1971 genre-bending Mass commissioned by Jackie Kennedy for the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington included both jazz swing, a rock band, and poignant, theatrical soliloquies about the challenges of religious faith. 

His exploration of the successes and disappointments of 19th Century presidents, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, was an instant flop on Broadway for the bicentennial in 1976 (critics hated the book but loved the music), but the song “Take care of this house” has remained a patriotic staple through good times and bad.

Candide also had a rough opening on Broadway in 1956 because of its book, and because its stylistic fit in between musical theater and opera (familiar in Europe as “operetta”) didn’t find its footing in New York until its revival two decades later with a cast of opera singers. It has since become a staple on both theatrical and operatic stages. 

Bernstein’s 1950 Peter Pan also didn’t find its place until the 1970’s as a children’s musical. Of course, his biggest Broadway success and the music he is most known for today is the musical West Side Story. But it too took a circuitous path as he and Jerome Robbins sought a way to portray both cultural conflict and the power of love. 

Their modern reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet started as “East Side Story” and a conflict between Irish Catholics and Lower East Side Jews, then moved west to Los Angeles and its Chicano turf wars, until settling in the Manhattan neighborhood between the Puerto Rican “Sharks” and the Anglo “Jets” brought together by the love of Maria and Tony. 

What made Bernstein’s life and work so distinctively American was his own very particular yet complex cultural makeup with his instinctive passion for the variety of human experience that makes America the unique nation it is. The words of Walt Whitman could be applied directly to Bernstein: “I contain multitudes!”