Leonard Bernstein

Written for a competition in the New York of 1942, while he was scrambling for work, and dedicated to his father, the piece layers the memories of a boy raised in the synagogue over the tragedy of European Jewry.

• The first movement, “Prophecy,” begins slowly and heavily, the horn’s long-drawn theme sounding like a prophet’s warning. Listen as well to the dark support the strings provide beneath it.
• The second movement, “Profanation,” is a fast dance whose meter changes constantly (mixed meter). The composer explained that it depicts the destruction and chaos brought on by corrupt priests and people, and the clashing rhythms of the brass and percussion create that tumult.
• Melodies throughout the work are steeped in the idiom of the synagogue’s chanted scripture reading (cantillation). The composer made clear that these were not literal quotations but borrowings of feeling.
• In the third movement, “Lamentation,” a mezzo-soprano (a female voice of middle range) sings from the Lamentations of Jeremiah in Hebrew. Weeping over fallen Jerusalem, the song sounds all the heavier for coinciding with its year of composition, 1942.

Written as he clung to Auden’s poem amid an unsettled private life and struggles over identity, the work was dedicated to his mentor Koussevitzky and premiered with Koussevitzky conducting and Bernstein at the piano.

• “The Prologue” opens with a lonely duet in which two clarinets answer each other like echoes. In Auden’s poem, it is the scene in which four strangers gathered in a wartime New York bar each bring out their solitude.
• “The Seven Ages” and “The Seven Stages” are variations, but the composer explained that rather than continually transforming a single theme, each variation arises by taking up one feature of the one before. Follow what carries over to the next, as in a word-chain game.
• “The Dirge (a song mourning the dead)” begins with the piano setting out a row that uses all twelve notes one by one (a 12-tone row), but it soon melts into a Romantic melody.
• “The Masque” is a fast, jazzy, playful piece (scherzo) led by the piano and percussion. In it you hear both the giddy din of an all-night party and the emptiness that follows.
• The weight given to the piano in “The Epilogue” differs from version to version. The 1965 revision expanded the solo piano part, so it is worth checking which version is being played and comparing as you listen.

Though the work satirized the hypocrisy of the McCarthy era and failed on stage after only 73 performances, its overture alone became the most frequently performed of his orchestral works.

• After opening with a short, vigorous brass fanfare, it races on without pause for a little over 4 minutes. At such a fast tempo, whether the orchestra locks together as a single body is what separates a polished performance from the rest.
• The broad, singing melody in the middle comes from the lovers’ duet “Oh, Happy We,” and the glittering, leaping figures come from “Glitter and Be Gay,” an aria in the high, dazzlingly virtuosic soprano style (coloratura).
• With so many rhythms whose accents shift to unexpected places, orchestral players know it as a short piece that never lets you relax. Listen for the moments when the snare drum and cymbals jab at the rhythm.
• Just after Bernstein’s death, the New York Philharmonic played this overture in his memory with the podium left empty.

A concert work fashioned from the music of the musical that brought him wealth and fame, with racial conflict and the tragedy of youth held within the rhythms of dance.

• In the “Prologue,” the musicians' finger snaps paint the tension of two gangs glaring at each other across the street.
• The sound that threads through the entire work is an uneasy interval six semitones wide, as between ‘C’ and ‘F#’: the augmented fourth (tritone). It hides even in the first two notes of “Maria,” ‘Ma-ri,’ so that foreboding takes up residence inside a love song.
• In “Mambo,” the musicians themselves shout “Mambo!” Latin percussion and brass explode here, in the most exhilarating passage of the piece.
• “Cool Fugue” is a fugue (a form in which voices chase one another as in a round), with the instruments entering one after another on the same tune over jazz rhythms. It pictures young men straining to hold down a boiling rage.
• In the finale the melody of “Somewhere” returns and quietly fades away. It sounds as if a song that dreams of reconciliation cannot shake off its uneasy shadow, even at the very end.

Completed at the end of a sabbatical in which he threw out his 12-tone sketches, the work carries in its Hebrew psalms both a resolve to trust in tonality and melody and a prayer for peace.

• Movement 1 opens with the chorus crying out Psalm 108, ‘Awake, psaltery and harp,’ and its great leaping figure of a 7th becomes the seed of the whole work. The Psalm 100 that follows is in 7/4, counting seven beats to the bar, and sounds like a limping, exuberant dance.
• In Movement 2 a boy soloist (or a countertenor, the high falsetto of a male voice) sings Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ to a harp accompaniment. It calls to mind the shepherd boy David singing as he plays his harp.
• Over that peace the men's chorus breaks in roughly with Psalm 2, ‘Why do the nations rage.’ This music was taken from a passage left out of West Side Story.
• Movement 3, after a bitter string prelude of clashing chords (dissonance), ends with a serene chorus singing Psalm 133, ‘Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.’ Don't miss the soft resonance of the final ‘Amen.’
• The composer directed that the work be sung only in Hebrew, without translation. That a piece commissioned by an Anglican cathedral should be sung in Hebrew says much about its character.

Written on a commission from Jacqueline Kennedy in an era split by the Vietnam War and political strife, the work reveals, through the priest's breakdown, an inner self that doubted its faith yet could not let it go.

• At the opening, recorded voices sing the ‘Kyrie (Lord, have mercy)’ in layer upon layer from loudspeakers all around, until the priest comes out with a guitar and stills the clamor by singing “A Simple Song.” The song is often performed on its own.
• The street chorus breaks in between the prayers with blues and rock, pouring out doubt and discontent. Listen to the way the Latin liturgy collides with the English lyrics.
• When the conflict reaches its height, the priest hurls down the chalice and sings a long monologue, “Things Get Broken.” Swinging between madness and silence, this scene is the most demanding passage for the singer in the role.
• At the end, ‘Peace be with you,’ begun in a boy soloist's song, spreads among the people onstage, and the work closes in quiet reconciliation.