Bernstein: Dybbuk

David Johnston (Performer), Leonard Bernstein (Composer), Leonard Bernstein (Conductor), New York City Ballet Orchestra (Orchestra) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: David Johnston
• Orchestra: New York City Ballet Orchestra
• Conductor: Leonard Bernstein
• Composer: Leonard Bernstein
• Audio CD (October 28, 1997)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Sony
• ASIN: B0000029XN
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #577,419 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. The Community

2. The Fathers

3. Witnesses of Birth

4. The Children

5. Kabbalah: Six Variations

6. Witnesses of Death - Leonard Bernstein

7. Leah

8. Possession

9. Exorcism

10. The Community

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars the wandering soul of Leonard Bernstein, July 24, 2011

By 

Discophage (France) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Bernstein: Dybbuk (Audio CD)

Bernstein's 48-minute ballet Dybbuk certainly doesn't belong to his most popular pieces - even among his "serious" music. It is a late work, dating from 1974, and it represented a renewal of Bernstein's collaboration with choreographer Jerome Robbins, afer their epoch-making 1944 Fancy Free, 1946 Facsimile, 1952 Wonderful Town and 1957 West-Side Story (Robbins also choreographed Bernstein's Symphony No. 2 "The Age of Anxiety" in 1950 and "Serenade" in 1959 - all this info comes from the very useful liner notes by Robert Jacobson). Dybbuk is also one of these compositions in which Bernstein draws upon his Jewish roots - others being the Jeremiah and Kaddish Symphonies (1942 and 1963), Chichester Psalms (1965).

The ballet is loosely based on S. Ansky's play The Dybbuk - the Jewish mythological figure of the dybbuk being the lost, restless soul that enters the body of a living person to possess it. What the liner notes don't tell you but Wikipedia does (bows of gratitude again to this well of universal and mostly accurate knowledge, two clicks away, and free) is that "S. Ansky" is the pen-name of Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport (1863-1920), "a Russian Jewish author, playwright, and researcher of Jewish folklore", "best known for his play The Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds (...), first staged in the Elyseum Theatre in Warsaw two months after the author's death in Otwock on November 8, 1920". The plot (back to the liner notes) is about the love pangs of a poor devout Orthodox theological student, Charon, whose love, the wealthy Leah, is to wed a rich party. Charon then turns to the Cabala to win Leah but, "at the moment of discovering the secret words that unleash the dark forces, he dies, overwhelmed by the fierce ecstasy of enlightenment". The unleashed dybbuk is ultimately defeated at Leah's wedding by the counterrituals of the elders of the religious communtiy, but, "unable to live without her predestined bridgegroom, Leah dies and joins him in spirit."

But Bernstein also looked into the Cabala, the traditional Jewish mystical system of numbering, for his inspiration, even claiming that (quoting here not Bernstein but the liner notes) "every note was arrived at by cabalistic or mystical manipulation of numbers". The liner notes go into some fascinating details about Berstein's numerical and compositional processes - but ultimately, it is not those "kitchen" matters that count: it is how the music sounds.

Well it sounds great and I'd be tempted to call Dybbuk Bernstein's most neglected orchestral masterpiece. It can be heard as a purely orchestral piece, independent of its plot. OK, this is Bernstein, don't expect cutting edge contemporary music - which, for many listeners, will be an advantage and not an obstacle. The language is hardly more advanced than Stravinsky's - Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (or Mosolov's Iron Foundries) as in track 1 at 3:10, or Stravinsky's wistful tunes in The Rake Progress (track 7, an evocation of Leah) - or Prokofiev's (try the snarling brass, track 1 at 1:10, that could have been in "Romeo & Juliet"). But Bersntein's other "source" is, evidently, Bernstein, and you have passages with the syncopations of West-Side Story (try the beginning of track 3 and you might even think you had returned to the Jets and Sharks) - but the language is always more dramatic and "serious" than in Bernstein's Broadway music: it is the language of Bernstein's symphonies. One original and appealing feature are the dialogues of the two fathers (maybe they are the elders of the Community), sung by baritone and bass, sounding like the chants of two Jewish Cantors (just try the start of track 1, 4, 5 and 10).

This is as good as anything written by the great American symphonists of the 1930s to 1970s, Copland, Schumann, Piston, Mennin, Harris. That's also the music's limitation: it is no more advanced than the music of these "great ancestors".