Customer Reviews

Leonard Bernstein: Piano Music

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Much as I love Bernstein, you'd have to be a die-hard completist to want more than a taste of his piano music. It's offered, in fact, in tiny bites. Bernstein wrote musical epigrams for his close friends, which were gathered into collections entitled "Anniversaries." the longest contains thirteen such musical sketches, on the order of a minute or two long. The others number four, five, and seven. Unlike Elgar's enigma Variations, there's no guessing about the people involved, who run the gamut form his wife, Felicia, through fellow composers like David Diamond and William Schuman, to mentors like Copland and Koussevitzky. It would be fascinating if Bernstein was giving us sketches of the foibles, quirks, or personalities of his subjects. I couldn't detect such mini-portraits, but perhaps others can. The idioms range across familiar Bernstein territory with jazzy up-tempo bits, mournful Jewish bits, quasi-populist Copland bits, and so on. After seven or eight samples, interest quickly flags. clearly the composer didn't waste much inspiration on these little birthday and anniversary cards in miniature.

Two slightly more substantial works fill out the CD. "Touches" from 1981 is described as a chorale with eight variations, but as with almost all the other piano writing, it's very spare, often one note at a time with a few slim chords. The variations are on the order of Poulenc -- breezy and cosmopolitan, without much interest beyond their witty surface. Sounding not much different is the Piano Sonata written when Bernstein was twenty; it sounds like a student exercise in a jittery style with influences of the Boulanger school. Pianist Stefan Litwin plays well enough, without any particular flashes of brilliance. Here's the complete program with dates:

7 Anniversaries, 1944
4 Anniversaries, 1948
5 Anniversaries, 1951
13 Anniversaries, 1988
Piano Sonata, 1938
Touches, 1981

for the incorrigible completist, there's a small handful of other piano works that I haven't heard.