Performing Arts : Recordings : Bernstein, With a Japanese Touch

BERNSTEIN: Symphony No. 3 (“Kaddish”), “Chichester Psalms”

Yehudi Menuhin, speaker; Karita Mattila, soprano; orchestra and choir of Radio France, Yutaka Sado, conductor

Erato

* * *

BERNSTEIN: Suite from “Candide,” Five Songs, Three Meditations from “Mass,” Divertimento

Beth Clayton, mezzo-soprano; Anthony Ross, cello; Minnesota Orchestra, Eiji Oue, conductor

Reference Recordings

* * 1/2

Leonard Bernstein had reach. The Japanese, for example, loved him, and he loved them back. Seiji Ozawa, in his youth, was Bernstein’s assistant. In the 1980s, Bernstein inaugurated a major festival for training young Japanese musicians in Sapporo. Among the group of Bernstein’s last proteges are two young Japanese conductors who have been rising quickly. And both now have recorded tributes to the master.

Sado’s career has flourished in France, and his new disc is remarkable in that he has undertaken to perform Bernstein’s most personal work, the “Kaddish” Symphony, with its epic argument with God--the one piece that even the most devoted Bernsteinians have nervously shied away from. While Sado’s reading is exceptional in its musicality and the vividness of instrumental color and detail, it is very different than the emotionally overwrought performances Bernstein gave.

The speaker, Menuhin, is an unsettling, otherworldly choice, especially given that his part was recorded just weeks before his death last fall. Mattila is a cool, beautiful singer; the French chorus makes mush of Hebrew so the result skirts spiritual issues, but it offers a fresh look at some very good music. “Chichester Songs” is Bernstein less troubled and especially infectious, and that is also Sado’s way.

Oue, the perky music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, seems to have gotten at least some of his flash from Bernstein’s example, and that is what he goes for on his disc. Everything is drenched in color. But that doesn’t necessarily go against the grain of the music. The news is a new suite from “Candide” arranged by Charlie Harmon (“Nobody knows the ‘Candide’ chronicle better than Charlie Harmon,” writes Charlie Harmon in the notes) and some new orchestrations of five Bernstein art songs, ranging over 30 years, by Sid Ramin.

I’m not sure these versions really add anything to Bernstein, but at least the meditations from “Mass” are given probing performances and the Divertimento an enthusiastic one. Showy orchestral playing, showy recorded sound--showy everything--is the main draw, even if it does make one mourn the great showman himself.