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RAVINIA’S STEANS MUSIC INSTITUTE
Bernstein challenges
singers—pushes us to use
our heads
,
our intellects
as well as our raw talent.
His music stickswithyou
.
It’s something you can’t forget.
–Nadine SIerra
“
devote her August 10 Martin Theatre concert with tenor Mi-
chael Fabiano and Murphy on piano to the songs of “Bernstein
and Friends.”
Among Bernstein’s works for voice and piano is
Le Bonne
Cuisine
, four 19th-century French recipes (plum pudding, oxtail
soup, a Turkish pastry, and rabbit stew) set to music by Bern-
stein in 1948. The five-minute piece is more of what we think of
as traditional Bernstein. “It’s fun to explore Bernstein’s songwrit-
ing because you can see where he’s going later with his theater
music,” says Murphy. “But I do think it’s both curious and inter-
esting that he didn’t write many art songs for piano and voice.
He was such an amazing accompanist—he played countless
recitals with singers, and he recorded a good deal of lieder.”
Twenty-nine years after he’d explored French cuisine,
Bernstein composed a much more serious song cycle.
Songfest
premiered in 1977 on an all-Bernstein program by the National
Symphony Orchestra.
Songfest: A Cycle of American Poems for
Six Singers and Orchestra
consists of 12 songs on texts by poets
as diverse as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Langston Hughes, and
Edna St. Vincent Millay. Of all the poems, Bernstein’s favor-
ite was Millay’s sonnet “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed”: “I
cannot say what loves have come and gone, / I only know what
summer sang in me / A little while, that in me sings no more.”
While the work was written for a full orchestra (a chamber
orchestra version was premiered at Ravinia in 2013), it can be
performed with piano. Last January’s RSMI Singers alumni
tour featured performances of selections from
Songfest
along
with
Psalm 148
and Bernstein’s
Two Love Songs
, settings of
verse by Rainer Maria Rilke. That program also offered a slice
of his theatrical music, including “I Go On” from
Mass
and
selections from
West Side Story
,
Trouble in Tahiti
, and
Candide
.
But the program didn’t feature just voices and piano, as indeed
RSMI’s upcoming performances of the complete songs won’t.
“There’s a song in
Songfest
called ‘To What You Said,’ which
has a cello obbligato. It’s just so touching and beautiful,” says
Murphy about the highlight. “To What You Said” is a setting by
Walt Whitman in which the poet confesses his long-concealed
love for another man. The poem was never published during
Whitman’s lifetime.
Bernstein died on Sunday, October 14, 1990. Placed beside
him in the coffin was the score to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, a
conductor’s baton, and a copy of
Alice in Wonderland.
Chore-
ographer and Bernstein collaborator Jerome Robbins wrote,
“Here in America we have lost one of the most vital makers
and shakers of the musical world. … A hunk of our landscape
has disappeared.” But much of him has stayed with us. This
summer is swaddled with Bernstein’s voice, from the largesse
of the musical-theatrical event of the season,
Mass
, and its
hundreds of onstage performers, to the choral masterpiece
Chichester Psalms
, to the solo vocal feature of the “Jeremiah”
Symphony, and, of course, the centenary man’s songs.
Jack Zimmerman graduated from the Chicago Conservatory with a degree in
trombone performance. He taught low brass at Arkansas Tech University, was
a Navy bandsman during the Vietnam War, and, at 38, began writing. He’s
authored several thousand newspaper columns and two novels, and in 2012 he
was bestowed the Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Arts Achievement Award.
was indirectly responsible for that. For a time, Sam Bernstein
was neither financially nor emotionally supportive of his son’s
musical dreams. “[My father’s] concept of a professional mu-
sician, which he’d brought with him from the Russian ghetto,
was of a
klezmer,
which is little better than a beggar, a guy with
a clarinet or a violin going from town to town to play for a few
kopecks at weddings and bar mitzvahs.”
To make money to pay for his musical studies, Bernstein
hit the stage. “Playing in jazz bands filled me with a new kind
of knowledge of popular music and black music that was far
beyond anything I knew from the radio … and it became part
of my musical bloodstream as had Chopin and Tchaikovsky. It
was a big hardship but such fun because it made me indepen-
dent of my father.”
Despite her youth, having been born in 1988, soprano Na-
dine Sierra has a long history with Bernstein. “My connection
with him started when I was 10 years old. I was always looking
for music to learn because I was completely insatiable. So at 10
I started learning ‘Glitter and Be Gay.’ I can never get enough
of his music. He challenges singers—pushes us to use our
heads, our intellects as well as our raw talent. His music sticks
with you. It’s something you can’t forget.” The RSMI alumna
and winner of the Met’s 2018 Beverly Sills Artist Award will
MERRI CYR