{"id":2446791,"date":"2019-07-25T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-25T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=310015"},"modified":"2019-07-25T16:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-07-25T22:00:00","slug":"a-taste-of-west-side-story-from-the-aspen-chamber-symphony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/a-taste-of-west-side-story-from-the-aspen-chamber-symphony\/","title":{"rendered":"A taste of \u2018West Side Story\u2019 from the Aspen Chamber Symphony"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Leonard Bernstein used to ruminate gloomily, usually after a concert of his more esoteric works, and generally having consumed a good deal of the contents of the Scotch bottle in his dressing room, that, no matter what he wrote, played, or conducted, \u201cAll I\u2019ll ever be remembered for is \u2018West Side Story.\u2019\u201d And that, very likely, is true. But he didn\u2019t garner much sympathy for this complaint. Bernstein may have dismissed \u201cWest Side Story\u201d as trivial but we know it to be one of the greatest pieces of musical theatre ever written, one of the two or three most perfect musical expressions both of its time \u2013 1957 \u2013 and of ours. For \u201cWest Side Story,\u201d both the full musical play and this orchestral work it spawned, harbours within it a fully realised picture of an era, expressed with a variety of tools, from jazz to Copland-style jagged edges, and from pop to Bach-like underscoring, liberally overlaid with Latin rhythms.<\/p>\n

The Aspen Chamber Symphony will perform \u201cWest Side Story Symphonic Dances,\u201d which Bernstein constructed from his own theatre score, on Friday at the Benedict Music Tent. The piece will bec onducted by Alondra de la Parra on a program that also includes Arturo Marquez\u2019 Danzon No. 2. And Aspen favorite Inon Barnatan as soloist for Barber\u2019s Piano Concerto.<\/p>\n

The musical sprang from an idea by the choreographer Jerome Robbins, just as Bernstein\u2019s earlier successful show \u201cOn The Town\u201d had originally been a Robbins ballet, \u201cFancy Free,\u201d for the New York City Ballet. \u201cWest Side Story,\u201d though, went the other way, being transformed from a musical play into a suite of dances which, given the revolutionary quality of the stage dances in the show, was not a long journey. It could be argued, I would, that much of Bernstein\u2019s best early work was composed as ballets and these \u201cSymphonic Dances,\u201d while they follow the arc of the story and are recognisably dramatically in line with the plot, are intrinsically the dances originally laid out by Robbins. They are symphonic in that their musical material is arranged as a series of thematic ideas, each one leading to the next, connecting from one to another without pause. The famous songs are all here in dance form from \u201cSomewhere to Maria\u201d and the rumble between the Sharks and the Jets is both a dream and a programmatic manifestation of the fight.<\/p>\n

\u201cWest Side Story Symphonic Dances\u201d is both a serious musical achievement and an easily accessible piece of concert delight. But Leonard Bernstein was a complicated man and, until he died, he continued to disparage \u201cWest Side Story\u201d as not worth as much as his other concert works. Indeed, Aaron Copland, Bernstein\u2019s mentor, friend and sometime lover, has a good deal to answer for, inadvertently, as the cause of Bernstein\u2019s depression about \u201cWest Side Story.\u201d Copland was Bernstein\u2019s model of an important contemporary composer and he always believed that he himself would have been Copland\u2019s artistic heir if \u201cWest Side Story\u201d had not been so commercially successful, a success, incidentally, that Bernstein craved.<\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leonard Bernstein used to ruminate gloomily, usually after a concert of his more esoteric works, and generally having consumed a good deal of the contents of the Scotch bottle in his dressing room, that, no matter what he wrote, played, or conducted, \u201cAll I\u2019ll ever be remembered for is \u2018West Side Story.\u2019\u201d And that, very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2446791","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-22 01:16:09","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2446791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2446791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2446791\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2446791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2446791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2446791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}