The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will help pay tribute to Leonard Bernstein at New York's Carnegie Hall next season, performing his eclectic Mass with the Morgan State University Choir and Brooklyn (N.Y.) Youth Chorus.
BSO music director and Bernstein protege Marin Alsop will conduct the Carnegie performance Oct. 24, as well as another concert the next day at the United Palace Theater, a restored vaudeville/movie venue in the uptown New York neighborhood of Washington Heights. The second performance will involve hundreds of New York City public-school students.
Mass, subtitled "a theater piece for singers, players and dancers," inaugurated the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington in 1971. Bernstein poured into the score almost every possible style, from stark atonality to pop song, as he examined the issue of faith in a troubled time.
Critical reaction tended toward the negative, if not downright hostile, but the work gradually won champions over the years, among them Alsop, who studied conducting with Bernstein.
"I think it's a terrific piece," she said yesterday from her Colorado home. "It feels to me far more topical than when it was written. The themes really are universal. It asks: What does religion mean? What does faith mean? Why are we so divided, and how can we come together? It's a very healing kind of piece."
Carnegie Hall's citywide festival, "Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds," commemorates the 90th anniversary of the conductor/composer's birth and the 50th anniversary of his appointment as music director of the New York Philharmonic.
The Philharmonic, which Bernstein led for 11 memorable years, will be led by music director Lorin Maazel and music director designate Alan Gilbert. The San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, will open the festival, which runs from Sept. 24-Dec. 13 and includes a wide range of performances, lectures and more throughout New York.
Shortly after becoming BSO music director designate in 2005, Alsop began discussing the prospect of producing the Bernstein work in Baltimore and New York. Local performances of Mass will take place a week before the New York ones. (The BSO will announce its full 2008-2009 season in February.)
Alsop's 1999 presentation of Mass at California's Cabrillo Music Festival, where she is music director, played to sold-out houses. In 2005, she won praise from the British press for a performance of the work with the London Symphony Orchestra, although Mass itself still generated some carping - one critic called it "tripe."
