Bernstein Wind Band Transcriptions – Weiss

Somewhere in Bernstein heaven — and one imagines a very crowded and noisy corner of it, with Koussevitzky still scolding him about tempo — there must be mixed feelings about wind band transcriptions of his theater and film scores. He loved to be arranged, orchestrated, repackaged; he was the least precious of composers about his own notes, always ready to let somebody else have a go at them. That generosity of spirit is being tested on this new Naxos release, in which some of his most beloved orchestral showpieces get put through the wind-ensemble wringer by six different arrangers with six different sets of instincts, not all of them good.

Let’s start with what works. The Three Dance Episodes from On the Town, in Marice Stith’s 1971 transcription, come off best — no surprise, since the piece was conceived close to the Broadway pit in the first place, all wisecracking trumpets and hip-swinging saxophones (yes, there are saxophones in a good wind band, thank goodness). Bernstein wrote this music at twenty-six, and the jazz-band DNA of the score translates fairly naturally to massed winds and percussion. The USC players dig into the syncopations with real snap.

Everything else is more of a mixed bag, and some of it is a real trial.

The Fanfare for the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy, barely a minute long, is genial enough — Sid Ramin’s brassy orchestration does what fanfares do, makes a big optimistic noise and gets offstage before anybody notices there isn’t much material there. Fine as a curtain-raiser. But then comes the Candide Overture, transcribed by the late Clare Grundman, and one has to ask: why? This is among the most brilliantly orchestrated pieces in the American repertoire — those chattering woodwinds, the whip-crack string writing, the giddy horn whoops. Strip away the strings and you strip away half the piece’s personality. What’s left is bright and loud and, in the end, a little exhausting.

The Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront, arranged by Jay Bocook as recently as 2010, suffers even more from de-orchestration. This score was Bernstein’s only original work for Hollywood, written for Elia Kazan’s 1954 film, and it is saturated with the kind of moody, chromatic brooding that owes an obvious debt to Copland’s film scores and, further back, to Mahler’s slow movements. That famous horn solo depends utterly on the burnished, veiled color only a real horn section playing against a hushed string bed can supply. Turn the strings into clarinets and saxophones, however skillfully, and the atmosphere goes flat.

Grundman also gave us the Divertimento, from 1980, written for the Boston Symphony’s centennial and full of Bernstein’s magpie tendencies — a bit of blues, a bit of Sousa parody, a “Turkey Trot” that struts happily and pointlessly. In its original orchestral guise it has enough wit and orchestral color to disguise its own slightness. In wind-band dress the slightness is rather harder to hide.

And then, for dessert, a second helping of Candide, this time the full 1993 suite — as if the overture weren’t enough exposure to Grundman’s orchestration for one disc. There is a real question buried here about Candide itself, one that goes beyond transcription. Bernstein’s score is glorious tune-mongering — “Glitter and Be Gay” alone earns him a place among American theater composers. But the music for the auto-da-fé scene, jaunty and bright while Pangloss and Candide are being tortured, exposes something that has bothered me about this piece since I first heard it decades ago: Bernstein never really grasped, or chose not to grasp, the savagery underneath Voltaire’s wit. The operetta charms audiences reliably. It has never, in any version I’ve encountered — Hal Prince’s, the various concert stagings, this suite — actually earned the satire it’s supposedly delivering.

None of this is the fault of Scott Weiss and his University of South Carolina players. Intonation is clean, the brass has heft without blare, and the woodwind soloists — a lovely, plaintive oboe in the Waterfront music, in particular — play with genuine expressive commitment. This is a very good college wind ensemble. Naxos’s engineering gives them a warm, well-balanced acoustic that flatters the section blend.

But good playing cannot supply what the arrangements themselves lack, which is Bernstein’s ear for exactly how much color a string section could add to an argument. Take that away, transcription by transcription, and what’s revealed is a composer whose gift lay less in structural or coloristic depth than in an inexhaustible, sometimes indiscriminate melodic generosity. He knew it about himself, more or less; late in life he worried constantly that he’d frittered his gifts across too many idioms, never quite settling into the “serious” composer he thought he was supposed to become.