Bernstein was always a problem for himself. The gifts came too easily and in too many directions at once — Broadway, the podium, the lecture hall, the television studio — and the result, for much of his career, was a kind of creative static, a gorgeous noise that could obscure the fact that the music underneath was often remarkable. What the wind band transcription format does, oddly enough, is strip some of that noise away. You lose the strings, lose the harmonic shimmer of a full orchestra, and what’s left has to stand on its own rhythmic and melodic legs. On this Naxos disc, it stands up very well indeed.
Scott Weiss and the University of South Carolina Wind Ensemble have assembled a program that moves across Bernstein’s theater work with real intelligence. The disc opens with the fanfare Bernstein wrote for the Kennedy Center — brief, jaunty, a little self-congratulatory in the best possible way — and the ensemble plays it with the kind of bright-edged confidence that tells you immediately this will not be a polite occasion.
Clare Grundman’s transcription of the Candide overture is the disc’s first sustained test, and it passes. Grundman — who spent decades writing for bands and knew the medium from the inside — treats Bernstein’s material with genuine fidelity, preserving the manic energy of those opening bars while finding colors in the winds that actually improve on what an orchestra sometimes turns into a blur. Intonation is rock-solid throughout, which matters enormously here: the overture’s quick modulations and stacked harmonies expose poor tuning like a bright light. None of that here. Weiss keeps the tempo taut without letting the piece turn brittle, and the climaxes land with real weight.
The On the Waterfront suite — Jay Bocook’s arrangement — is something else again. Bernstein wrote that score in 1954 under enormous pressure, finishing it while simultaneously working on Wonderful Town, and the music carries that pressure inside it, a coiled tension that never quite releases. Bocook understands this. The louder passages hit hard, but the moodier interludes — the brooding, forward-moving middle sections — are where the real drama lives, and Weiss doesn’t rush past them. His players sustain a pianissimo with the focused concentration of musicians who’ve been told, correctly, that restraint is its own form of expression.
Then there’s Marice Stith’s On the Town suite, and here the disc genuinely takes off. Stith catches something essential about how Bernstein’s Broadway rhythms work: they’re not jazz, exactly, but they’re not not jazz either. They live in the space between, and the ensemble navigates that space with a naturalness that’s harder to achieve than it sounds — plenty of professional groups make this music feel labored or merely efficient. The dance numbers are pin-sharp without being mechanical, and “Lonely Town — Pas de Deux” is given a weight, almost a symphonic gravity, that earns its place alongside the surrounding frivolity.
Grundman’s Divertimento closes the program. The “Waltz” is lovely — genuinely lovely, not merely competent — and the “Samba,” bongos and bass drum and all, burns at a high temperature without ever losing control. Weiss seems to know exactly where the edge is.
The Naxos engineers deserve mention. Wind band recordings so often have a fatiguing brightness to them, a kind of metallic sheen that wears you out after twenty minutes. Not here. The sound is full and clear without being harsh, and the balance across the ensemble is consistently well-judged.
University ensembles occasionally produce recordings that are technically impressive but emotionally tentative — students playing carefully rather than freely. This is not that. Whatever Weiss has built at South Carolina, it produces music-making that sounds lived-in, committed, even a little dangerous in the best passages. Bernstein would have approved. He always preferred dangerous.
