Then it was virtually non-stop conducting until he got married in 1951 and turned back to composition. In his debut year, 1943-44, he did both and had big hits with his first ballet, Fancy Free, and his first musical, On the Town. Bernstein was always in two minds as to whether he was primarily a conductor or a composer. Steel believed passionately in AQP, which he had seen as a schoolboy in Washington in 1984, and in his pre-Christmas season he went for broke, putting together an innovative, youthful, no-expense-spared production of Bernstein's opera with Christopher Alden as its creative director.ĪQP has a complex history. Was that to be the last we heard of it? The answer came late last year, and it was a resounding no, delivered by George Steel, the youthful managing director of the beleaguered New York City Opera. Prestigious venues all, and they garnered better reviews, but still no interest from New York's Metropolitan Opera – whose policy under Joe Volpe, its managing director at the time, was ultra-conservative. But those are Broadway works, whereas AQP is opera, and what's worse it dates from Bernstein's last decade, when he was dabbling with atonality and had turned his back on music theatre after the failure of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (his 1976 musical ran for only seven performances).ĪQP, too, had a rough reception at its premiere in Houston in 1983 – the New York Times called it "one long series of cliches, musically and dramatically" – and it underwent major surgery before being mounted in Washington, La Scala and the Vienna State Opera, the last conducted by Bernstein himself. Candide was a hit at the National theatre, and is soon to be revived by the LSO. Simon Rattle's conducting of Wonderful Town enchanted Berliners and Prommers alike. Mass (the theatre piece) wowed London audiences just last July. West Side Story has been packing in punters worldwide since 1957. At first sight it's hard to explain the neglect. I t was 20 years after his death before Leonard Bernstein's opera A Quiet Place finally got to be performed in New York, the city he lived in for close on half a century.
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