By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, July 19, 2024 – Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) composed The Age of Anxiety, with a commission from mentor Serge Koussevitsky, in the aftermath of WWII, after reading W.H. Auden’s poem of the same name. He issued a revised version of Symphony No. 2, for piano and orchestra in 1965, to undo its over reliance on poetics. He regarded it as “one of the most shattering examples of pure virtuosity in the history of English poetry.”
Every generation needs virtuosi like Bernstein and Auden (1909-1973), even if we still wind up where we are today, when the moving image of mass media has practically made the printed word obsolete.
Dina Slobodeniouk conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra and piano soloist Conrad Tao in this Koussevitsky Music Shed performance, on as pleasant an evening as the Berkshires produces this deep into summer.
It always is a special treat to listen to both a great soloist and a great orchestra and tonight was no exception. In response to the audience’s applause, Mr. Tao returned and paid tribute to Bernstein with an encore of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, the ballad Harold Arlen composed for Bernstein’s West Side Story.
While the music and poetry of Bernstein and Auden are immortal, the era they shared with each other is as alien to the general public as is the one shared by Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Johannes Brahms (1832-1897), whose Symphony No. 3 in F was performed after intermission.
Brahms is said to have composed it all at once during the summer of 1883 in Wiesbaden. In the artful hands of Maestro Slobodeniuk and the BSO, it proved a brilliant coda to a splendid evening of music.