This new version of Leonard Bernstein’s problematic Third Symphony isn’t going to make any new friends for the piece, since from a purely musical point of view the problem never has been what its speaking part says, but rather that anything is said at all. In other words, the combination of the music, which is marvelous, and spoken dialog, which as a device is invariably irritating (except perhaps as used in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf), is something that simply has to be lived with. Bernstein’s original text had the advantage of being admirably direct, making his points forcefully and unapologetically. Daughter Jamie Bernstein’s watered-down revision does nothing to improve what after all is Bernstein’s most angry and confrontational work.
It also changes the symphony’s focus from the “everyman” speaker’s inflammatory confrontation with God to some rather trite comments about Jamie remembering her dad’s problematic relationship with God. And that, quite frankly, trivializes its message. If Bernstein’s music is to take its place in the pantheon of “classics”, it will be because of its universality, and this was a quality that the original text took pains to capture, avoiding any explicit autobiographical or otherwise quotidian references. For all Bernstein’s much vaunted self-absorption, he was a genius, and he deserves credit for knowing what he was doing and why, even if we may not always like the result. His daughter, who admits to having an equivocal relationship to this particular work, should have left it alone.
That said, Leonard Slatkin turns in a fine performance and gets very good results from his various BBC forces. He’s naturally better recorded than Bernstein himself in his two recordings, but then there’s also the excellent and very inexpensive recent Naxos edition of this same work in its original version, featuring the Royal Liverpool Symphony under Gerard Schwarz. The Chichester Psalms and the Missa Brevis are also quite sympathetically performed–but again, not to the point where it might sway your decision to purchase this particular version of the symphony. The Psalms are also the coupling on the Naxos disc. I wish I could be more positive about Ms. Bernstein’s contribution, but it strikes me that her efforts may well do more harm than good, reinforcing rather than allaying doubts about Kaddish, and delaying its acceptance into the musical mainstream. Family members, however caring, are not always the best guardians of a great artist’s legacy.
