Bernstein
Candide – Operetta in two Acts to lyrics by Richard Wilbur with additional contributions by Stephen Sondheim, John Latouche, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, the composer, et al; book adapted from Voltaire by Hugh Wheeler revised by John Caird; orchestrations by Bernstein & Hershy Kay with further scoring by John Mauceri, et al [sung in English]
Narrator / Pangloss / Martin – Richard Suart
Candide – Rob Houchen
Cunegonde – Katie Hall
Maximilian – Charles Rice
Old Woman – Rosemary Ashe
Paquette – Kitty Whately
Cacambo / Governor / Vanderdendur / Agent – Robert Murray
The Grange Festival Chorus
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Alfonso Casado Trigo
Christopher Luscombe – Director
Reviewed by: David Gutman
Reviewed: 8 July, 2018
Venue: The Grange, Northington, Alresford, Hampshire, England
The austere magnificence of The Grange sits a little oddly with the eclecticism and informality of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide but if this one-off, not-quite concert performance fell between several stools no-one seemed to mind. The last event in this year’s Grange Festival it was rapturously received by a packed house, while the modest speechifying at the close included the announcement of a thirty-year lease. Michael Chance’s shows will go on.
Candide is famously a problem piece whose dissemination was boosted by an original Broadway cast recording starring Max Adrian, Robert Rounseville and the much-missed Barbara Cook. Today its ceaselessly allusive, European, Jewish, Offenbach-meets-Marc Blitzstein idiom has surmounted the absence of the urban jazz element anticipated by earlier audiences. The recent attempts to overcome the lack of conventional narrative and render Candide more conventionally stageworthy have rehabilitated additional numbers while mangling the lyrics of others, dampening the wit even of Pangloss’s big teach-in, ‘The Best of All Possible Worlds’.
Bernstein worked on Candide and West Side Story simultaneously but the statistics tell their own story. It was the former that opened first on Broadway in December 1956, closing again after just seventy-three performances. Not until 1989, by which time a host of lyricists and co-writers had worked on it, did it acquire a final shape that satisfied the composer who braved a flu epidemic to record this “Concert Version” (with some very slow tempos) for Deutsche Grammophon, though even this was tweaked for posthumous publication. Its Overture was already a classic, the aforementioned cast album a cult success.
What was on offer at The Grange was something closer to a cut version of the Royal National Theatre version as rejigged by John Caird: ‘Quiet’, Bernstein’s hilarious, partly Schoenbergian disquisition on upper-class miseries and deficient buttocks, is among the numbers that doesn’t appear in that and ‘What the use?’ is different again. Does it matter that there is no definitive solution? With the RNT’s smaller pit forces expanded to not quite ‘concert version’ size, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra sported four double basses and seemed to be playing the official score notwithstanding the occasional apocryphal thwack.
The band’s response was inevitably affected adversely by the heat, less so after the interval when the vocal miking seemed slightly boosted. Perhaps there have been more transcendent renditions of ‘Make Our Garden Grow’ but, whatever the occasional flaws, the strength of the score and the commitment of the performers shone through. A memorable evening at a unique venue.