Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Bernstein: West Side Story

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Even though it was intended for the popular American musical theater, Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (1957) is a major contender for the title of The Great American Opera. (Gershwin's Porgy and Bess is, of course, another serious contender.) I have broadcast the entire musical only once before, on Sunday, July 13, 2003, presenting a 2001 studio recording with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, conducted by one of Bernstein's old musical pals, Kenneth Schermerhorn. The Naxos CD release gave us the opportunity to hear Bernstein's complete and more nearly operatic score prior to its subsequent Broadway and film alterations.

Today you get to hear West Side Story in a 2013 concert production recorded live in performance in San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall. Michael Tilson Thomas was directing the San Francisco Symphony and members of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. Starring in the cast are singing actors Alexandra Silber as Maria and Cheyenne Jackson as Tony. Bernstein himself did not conduct West Side Story until 1984, when he recorded it for Deutsche Grammophon with a cast of operatically trained singers. Michael Tilson Thomas followed much of the 1984 DGG recording of the work, employing a beefed up adaptation of the Broadway orchestration. So this is a basically a Broadway-style West Side Story with considerable crossover elements of opera. It comes to us on two CD's courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony's own record label.