West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein
Naxos has issued a recording of the “Original Score” of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story performed by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Schermerhorn and a cast including Mike Eldred as Tony and Betsi Morrison as Maria.
Andrew
Clements in the Guardian
of 22 November 2002 wrote of this recording: “It's a
performance of the first, pre-Broadway, pre-movie, version of the score and it
is at least delivered like a musical rather than an opera manqué. But that is
all one can say in its favour: accents come and go, voices are uncertain, the
tone is sometimes knowingly coy, sometimes dramatically intense.”
I have bought the recording myself, and I am
pleased with it. The chorus is especially
enthusiastic. But both the Broadway
cast recording and the movie soundtrack
are better. At least it is not bizarre
and pretentious like Bernstein’s recording with Kiri Te Kanawa and José Carreras.
Te Kanawa and Carreras should have recorded The King and I
instead of West Side Story.
American Anthem
With Kevin Murphy, piano.
Songs of American composers Barber, Rorem, Copland, Ives, Gorney, Scheer, and Bolcom.
Heidi Grant Murphy
With Kevin Murphy, piano.
Aria “V’adoro pupille” from Giulio Cesare in Egitto by Handel; songs of Wagner, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Bachelet, Schumann, Schubert, Rachmaninov, Richard Strauss, Brahms, Barber, and Copland.
Selected recordings of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson