B&B

NYFOS threw itself a twentieth-anniversary bash on Tuesday: Bernstein’s music constituted the first half, and Bolcom’s music was vivified, at the last moment, by the addition of Bill himself, with radiant Joan.   A sextet of singers, stylish and at ease, sauntered from opera (WB’s McTeague) and concert (LB’s Songfest) to both men’s theatre scores—Wonderful Town and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (LB) and Casino Paradise (WB); artful Bill Sharp made a small, still scene of Bernstein’s “The Love of My Life,” and Rebecca Jo Loeb, still at Juilliard, recruited a whole circus of voices to Bolcom’s “How to swing those obbligatos around.”  Joan and Bill finished the evening with a microset that included Lieber and Stoller and John Wallowich as well as Bill’s own “Over the Piano;” then they, J, and I dashed to Compass (which, God love them, stayed open for us) for monkfish, champagne, and gossip.

Few, I think, draw a direct line from (Gershwin,) Bernstein and Bolcom to, say, Osvaldo Golijov or Jefferson Friedman: compare, if you dare, Bernstein’s Clarinet Sonata to Jefferson’s Eight Songs for baritone sax and percussion.  But all these composers draw effortlessly from “pop” (the quotes are inevitable, aren’t they?) for their concert work.  Two things are different.  The first is that the sound of both pop and concert work has changed dramatically since the 1950s.  The second, blessedly, is that fewer and fewer criticize composers for the thought-crime of open ears. Bernstein, in 1976, had introduced his Songfest in D.C. right before beginning rehearsals for the première of J’s Clarinet Concerto (the first of his antiphonal quasi-aleatoric extravaganzas,) and over dinner J remembered LB all but apologizing for the “squareness” of his (LB’s) composition.  Songfest is, in fact, both generous and rangy: but I think Bernstein’s diffidence (a quality rarely ascribed to him) speaks less about him than about how stringently his delight in pop was criticized in the years he was writing.  Bernstein’s Mass was slammed from pillar to post.  Almost forty years later, Golijov has a MacArthur.   Nice to see how things move on.