BERNSTEIN: Chichester Psalms / On the Waterfront

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Chichester Psalms, although a comparatively short work (less than 20 minutes in duration) is one of Bernstein's most popular pieces and provides a good introduction to his writing. It is full of Bernsteinian dramatic contrasts. It utilises his trademark lively, asymmetrical rhythms, often with five or seven beats to the bar; his angular melodies with large, surprising leaps; his placing of accents where least expected; his use of speech rhythm in song. The text is the original Biblical Hebrew, which Bernstein sometimes daringly manipulates to great dramatic effect. The last movement opens with a dissonant orchestral Prelude recalling both the opening of the work and the Psalm 23 tune, then settles into a setting of Psalm 131 ('Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty...') marked peacefully flowing. This is in a steady 10/4 rhythm (which is really pairs of 5/4) and is as richly melodic as any Broadway number. This segues into the final section, the first verse of Psalm 133, 'Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity,' sung by unaccompanied choir. There is a final pianissimo 'Amen'. In the 'Love Duet' that follows, the couple try to get a handle on what this 'love' thing might mean, how long it might last, whether it is lofty or banal, and whether any of this really matters. 'Scary, the way it flows, as if it knows the mystery; scary, the way it grows and grows, incessantly, evenly, unevenly...' The song they are singing is a metaphor for their relationship itself. Love turns out to be hard to define and impossible to conceptualise, neither soaring to great heights nor plunging into the depths, as the couple drift along within what might be termed an area of tolerable conflict. With two film adaptations and many successful stage runs, West Side Story is Bernstein’s best-known work by far. A collaboration with lyricist Stephen Sondheim and director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, it’s considered by many to be one of the greatest musicals of all time. Here they are together, right after the performance, live from Jerusalem. It was the first thing transmitted on the Israelian TV overall. Daniel Oren sings the boy soprano solo in Chichester Psalms with Bernstein. (Courtesy of Oren) Marjory Klein: Once in a Lifetime

This year, to celebrate Leonard Bernstein's centenary, the Chichester Psalms will once again be performed in the Cathedral on Saturday 24th November. This performance promises to be a major highlight of the year's celebrations. Chichester Psalms is an extended choral composition in three movements by Leonard Bernstein for boy treble or countertenor, choir and orchestra. The text was arranged by the composer from the Book of Psalms in the original Hebrew. Part 1 uses Psalms 100 and 108, Part 2 uses 2 and 23, and Part 3 uses 131 and 133. [1] Bernstein scored the work for a reduced orchestra, but also made a version for an even smaller ensemble of organ, one harp, and percussion. Chichester Psalms was Bernstein's first composition after his 1963 Third Symphony ( Kaddish). These two works are his two most overtly Jewish compositions. While both works have a chorus singing texts in Hebrew, the Kaddish Symphony has been described as a work often at the edge of despair, while Chichester Psalms is affirmative and serene at times.He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me to water in places of repose; He renews my life; He guides me in right paths as befits His name. The orchestra were looking for a piece to help them celebrate their centennial, and Bernstein accepted. The composer had a long-term sentimental connection to the city, having grown up and attended university there, made his directorial debut at the Tanglewood Music Center, and conducted more then 130 concerts with the orchestra itself. After the June 23rd concert by Orchestra Sinfonica de Roma, the Harvard Glee Club and the Newark Boys Chorus, the Pope blessed the musicians, and thanked Bernstein, saying: “ Ecco un Americano che vien a dare lezione musicale a noi della vecchia Europa. (Behold an American who has come to give music lessons to us of the old Europe.)” Hear Chichester Psalms Today The short 'Prelude' typifies an inner calm surrounded by external storms. The piano music is discordant and impetuous, but is calmly interrupted by the couple singing 'I love you. It's easy to say it and so easy to mean it too.' The piano seems to disagree, but the couple are off on an exploration of what 'I love you' means for them, how they can hold onto that in a turbulent world and where it might lead them.

The work premiered at the Philharmonic Hall in New York City on 15 July 1965, conducted by the composer. That was followed by a performance at Chichester Cathedral as part of the festival, for which it was commissioned, on 31 July that year, conducted by John Birch. In an effort to emphasize that he was not seeking a more narrowly liturgical piece in the traditional sense, nor a conservative work of more typically reverential High Church aesthetics, he encouraged Bernstein to write freely, without inhibitions. He even expressed the wish that the music might incorporate some of the composer’s Broadway side, telling Bernstein, “Many of us would be very delighted if there was a hint of West Side Story about the music.” The music for the beginning of the second movement is taken from sketches from Bernstein's unfinished The Skin of Our Teeth. The men's theme was adapted from material cut from West Side Story. Chichester Psalms juxtaposes vocal part writing most commonly associated with Church music (including homophony and imitation), with the Judaic liturgical tradition. Bernstein specifically called for the text to be sung in Hebrew (there is not even an English translation in the score), using the melodic and rhythmic contours of the Hebrew language to dictate mood and melodic character. By combining the Hebrew with Christian choral tradition, Bernstein was implicitly issuing a plea for peace in Israel during a turbulent time in the young country’s history. Each of the three movements of Chichester Psalms contains one complete Psalm plus excerpts from another paired Psalm. Musically, Bernstein achieved Dr. Hussey’s wish for the music to remain true to the composer’s own personal style. The piece is jazzy and contemporary, yet accessible. In a letter to Hussey, Bernstein characterized it as “popular in feeling,” with “an old-fashioned sweetness along with its more violent moments.”

Overview

In 1977, Bernstein described Chichester Psalms: “the most accessible, B-flat major-ish tonal piece I’ve ever written.” Three Movements, Six Psalms: Words of Peace and Reconciliation

It consists of eight movements, with more and less traditional titles from ‘Waltz’ and ‘Mazurka’ to ‘Turkey Trot’ and ‘Sphinxes’. Bernstein based the music around the notes B and C, for ‘Boston’ and ‘Centennial’. The work was commissioned for the 1965 Southern Cathedrals Festival at Chichester Cathedral by the cathedral's Dean, Walter Hussey. [2] However, the world premiere took place in the Philharmonic Hall, New York, on 15 July 1965 with the composer conducting, followed by the performance at Chichester on July 31, 1965, conducted by the cathedral's Organist and Master of the Choristers, John Birch. [3] [2] The music of Chichester Psalms is essentially American, incorporating within its core 'classical' style elements of Bernstein's beloved jazz, blues and Broadway music. When commissioning the work the dean of Chichester Cathedral mentioned that 'many of us would be delighted if there was a hint of West Side Story about the music'. Bernstein duly obliged.The story began in 1963 when Walter Hussey, Dean of Chichester Cathedral, wrote to Leonard Bernstein asking if he would compose a piece of choral music for the Southern Cathedrals Festival in 1965. Bernstein accepted and the result was his choral masterpiece the Chichester Psalms. O Lord, my heart is not proud nor my look haughty; I do not aspire to great things or to what is beyond me; but I have taught myself to be contented like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child am I in my mind. In 1965, the Dean of Chichester Cathedral, the Very Reverend Dr. Walter Hussey, commissioned Bernstein to compose a work based on the Psalms for that summer’s Southern Cathedrals Festival. Dr. Hussey, who has been called “the last great patron of art in the Church of England,” was well known as a visionary and enlightened champion of the arts in general. First in his capacity as Vicar of St. Matthew’s Church, in Northampton, and then as the Dean of Chichester, he also commissioned works for the Church by such serious composers, painters, sculptors, and poets as Benjamin Britten, William Walton, Marc Chagall, W. H. Auden, Graham Sutherland, and Henry Moore. As he later recalled, the seed for Dr. Hussey’s approach to Bernstein had been planted in his imagination the previous year by the Cathedral’s organist and choirmaster, John Birch, who had recommended inviting a composer to write a choral piece for the Festival in a “slightly popular” yet still manifestly artistic style. That almost immediately prompted Dr. Hussey to think of the composer of West Side Story, whom he had met only briefly in New York in the early 1960s; John Birch concurred. He had this goal all his life to bring people together regardless of their religions, origins, generations, and aspirations in life,” Nézet-Séguin said. “Bernstein showed all of us the way many decades ago. And now, all of the world, this is what we’re trying to do in the symphony orchestras, in opera houses, and concert presenters is to break boundaries.” Daniel Oren Chichester Psalms juxtaposes vocal part writing most commonly associated with Church music (including homophony and imitation), with the Judaic liturgical tradition.

The offer of the Chichester commission came during Bernstein’s sabbatical year from the New York Philharmonic, just as he was in the throes of disappointment over the miscarriage of a project on which he had been working, a Broadway musical show based on Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth. “The wounds are still smarting,” he wrote to fellow American composer David Diamond in the beginning of 1965. “I am suddenly a composer without a project.” He thus welcomed the opportunity the Chichester commission provided, and he proceeded to compose the work in New York in the spring of that year. The result appears not only to have leaned melodically and rhythmically on its composer’s Broadway proclivities, but, as Dr. Hussey had assured him would be welcome, on actual moments of his earlier stage music. As Bernstein’s biographer Humphrey Burton and others familiar with Bernstein’s theatrical music have observed, the second movement contains, in the lower voices, an adaptation of a passage from the Prologue to West Side Story, which is heard now to the words of Psalm 2 ( lama rag’shu goyim ul’umim yeh’gu rik?). And material derived from his recently shelved drafts and sketches for the aborted Skin of Our Teeth project was recycled and accommodated to Psalm verses in all three movements. Moreover, Burton demonstrated that Bernstein’s choice of specific Psalms and verses was informed by their potential adaptability to the rhythm and cadence of lyrics that had already been written for that musical show by the celebrated team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green. The concert also included J.S. Bach’s Magnificat; however, Chichester Psalms claims the historic significance of the day: this was likely the first time music with a Hebrew text was performed at the Vatican. The music mostly has simple harmonies, apart from a couple of more dissonant passages at the very start of the piece and at the beginning of the last movement. This is how Bernstein described Chichester Psalms in the New York Times: The Psalms are a simple and modest affair, The orchestration of Chichester Psalms calls for six brass (three trumpets and three trombones), two harps, a large percussion section, and strings. The original conception or “version”—in which form the work was given its premiere at Chichester Cathedral at the end of July 1965—is for a chorus exclusively of men and boys, with the boys’ voices on the soprano and alto lines. (This follows the German, or continental European choral tradition, rather than the established English Church format that calls typically for boys only on the soprano line with adult countertenors on the alto part.) Two weeks earlier, however, Bernstein conducted the actual world premiere at New York’s Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall), with the New York Philharmonic and the Camerata Singers—a mixed choir with women’s voices substituting for boys on the soprano and alto parts. Performances since then have been given in both formats. But Bernstein stipulated in a note to the published score that the long alto solo in the second movement, which is unsuited to the timbre of the female—and certainly an adult female—voice, must always be sung either by a boy (which is generally preferable) or a countertenor.Raise a shout for the Lord, all the earth; worship the Lord in gladness; come into His presence with shouts of joy. How nice, that the great maestro Bernstein chose a young Daniel Oren as the [boy soprano] soloist of Chichester Psalms, one of his masterpieces among his own compositions. As soon as Maestro Bernstein heard Oren singing only two notes, he said: “It’s him I was looking for.”