Festival Music

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

three stars

THE second of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s Bernstein centenary-celebrating concerts was focused on Lenny the composer and should by rights have been a bit of a party, with Marin Alsop – very much keeper of the Leonard Bernstein flame in her Baltimore music director post – conducting the dance suites from the scores of West Side Story and On The Town after the interval. In fact, I bet the SCO, Scottish tenor Nicky Spence and soprano Lucy Crowe give the Americans a run for their money with their performance of the music from the shows at the Fireworks Concert on Monday night. Although Alsop herself was mobile enough on the podium, there was a real lack of swagger and zing in the performance of this popular music, no matter how hard the pianist and percussion tried to drive it along, with trombones that plodded where they should have swung.

There had been more fun, in fact, in the opening selections from the Bernstein Birthday Bouquet, written for his 70th by Berio, Corigliano, Takemitsu and John Williams. Full of quotations from his and other composers’ work, they featured examples of “sampling” long before the term became popular. But these are very slight pieces, so the meat of the first half was Bernstein’s Serenade, after Plato’s Symposium, with soloist Nicola Benedetti. Commissioned in memory of his own mentor, Serge Koussevitzky, like the Age of Anxiety Symphony which we heard from the LSO earlier in the Festival, I am not sure how much help knowing the literary inspiration of the work really is. In many ways it is still a concerto, although the composer rejected that description, and a demanding one at that.

The soloist was as reliably on her mettle as we know to expect. And has some lovely lyrical, as well as demanding, music to play but here too the orchestra seemed to lack the edge its side of the conversation requires. While Benedetti found the changes of tone the five movements require, there was less variety of colour and dynamics in the ensemble.