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Have Bernstein Song, Will Travel
Posted July 25, 2024
Have Bernstein Song, Will Travel
By Jamie Bernstein
My father loved words every bit as much as he loved notes – and best of all for him was any opportunity to put words and notes together. He loved writing songs, and he wrote many: for Broadway shows, in song cycles, embedded in operas. Taken as a whole, Bernstein’s song repertoire comprises a rich trove for singers (and accompanists), while also providing a delightful way to introduce new audiences and artists to his music.
In recent months, I’ve encountered several occasions where Bernstein songs were a major component: in cabaret settings, clubs, and on campus.
Mallory Portnoy and Nick Blaemire. Photo by Jenny Anderson.
Back in March, Nick Blaemire and Mallory Portnoy, who portrayed Adolph Green and Betty Comden in Bradley Cooper’s Maestro film, presented a pair of glittering evenings at New York's fabled Café Carlyle, singing songs from the Comden and Green writing team’s various shows and film scores. The sold-out crowd was full of Broadway insiders mixed with out-of-towners who might not have known much about Bernstein, or Comden and Green. The reactions were euphoric across the board. Among the Bernstein songs in the collection was “Ohio” from the Bernstein/Comden/Green musical Wonderful Town. In an act of shameless exuberance, my sister Nina and I climbed onstage and sang that one ourselves.
Tony Yazbeck in the Classic Stage Company presentation of Bernstein's Broadway. Photo courtesy of the Classic Stage Company.
A couple of months later, Broadway luminary Santino Fontana teaped up with Classic Stage Company, an off-Broadway theatre on East 13th Street in New York City, to present a star-studded evening of songs from Bernstein's Broadway shows. It was a small, in-the-know audience, but the finale – that mother of all finales, “Make Our Garden Grow” from Candide – was amplified by a high school chorus from Friends Seminary, a school a few blocks north. What a joy it was to watch, and hear, those young people discovering the delights of singing Bernstein music.
Norm Lewis performs at 54Below
Later that month, I experienced an odd coincidence. At the end of Broadway stalwart Norm Lewis’s solo evening at 54 Below (New York), he came back for one last encore, and sang a slow, rapturous rendition of “Lucky to Be Me” from On the Town. No dry eyes in the house – Norm’s included. The very next night, down at the Village Vanguard, I was reveling in a set by my favorite jazz composer and pianist, Fred Hersch. Fred’s encore? “Somewhere,” from West Side Story. It felt downright magical to hear Bernstein songs providing the final punctuation on two musical evenings in a row.
Two weeks later, I was on the campus of Pomona College in Claremont, CA, participating in SongFest, an annual three-week workshop for vocal students. My friends, soprano Amy Burton and her husband, composer/pianist John Musto, invited me to join them in preparing the students for the all-Bernstein final concert.
The student singers ranged from college to post-graduate age, and what a talented and intrepid bunch they were: bursting with energy and promise, and up for anything. They gave their all, and the concert was a mad success. How grand it was to hear the full variety of the Bernstein songbook: everything from the broad comedy of “Carried Away” from On the Town, to the lacerating melancholy of “There Is a Garden” from Bernstein’s opera Trouble in Tahiti, to the 12-tone storybook quirkiness of “Little Smary” from the song cycle Arias & Barcarolles.
Jamie Bernstein with performers from SongFest in Claremont, CA. Photo by Jeanine Hill Photography.
It was another song from Arias & Barcarolles that made the greatest impression on me. Felix Zender, a student of Amy Burton’s from Juilliard who was attending the workshop, had elected to sing the quietly powerful song “Greeting.” But there was some uncertainty about whether it made sense for Felix, who is trans, to sing about “When a boy is born” and “When a girl is born…” Was this going to sit right?
Amy, a gifted teacher, has been working hard with Felix to help him find the right range for his newly masculine voice. At the moment, Felix is a countertenor. When his turn in the concert came, Felix stood on the stage, tall and slim and still, with intense eyes and long, flowing brown hair, and sang with his otherworldly voice: “Every time a child is born/ For the space of that brief instant/ The world is pure.”
And I forgot to breathe. Felix’s voice contained multitudes – as if it were speaking to us from another realm. I thought about how thrilled my father would have been, to witness his music being taken to a new place -- beyond anything he himself might have imagined.