FULL Bernstein West Side Story and Weill Concert Stockholm 2024 Nils Landgren, Ida Sand
Information on the Performance
- Work Title: Bernstein West Side Story and Weill Concert
- Composer: Bernstein Leonard, Weill Kurt
- Libretto: various
- Venue & Opera Company: Berwaldhallen, Stockholm, Sweden
- Recorded: September 20, 2024
- Type: Concert Live
- Singers: Nils Landgren, Ida Sand
- Conductor:
- Orchestra: Sveriges Radios Symfoniorkester
- Stage Director:
- Costume Designer:
Information about the Recording
- Published by: Berwaldhallen
- Date Published: 2024
- Format: Streaming
- Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
- Subtitles: nosubs
- Video Recording from: Berwaldhallen Play FULL VIDEO
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE
Jazz star Nils Landgren visits the Berwaldhallen and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra for an evening of music from the album Some Other Time (A tribute to Leonard Bernstein). With him on stage, he has some of Sweden’s foremost jazz musicians: singer Ida Sand, pianist Joel Lyssarides, bassist Lars Danielsson and percussionist Robert Ikiz.
As one of the 20th century’s foremost music creators in both jazz and musicals as well as operetta, Leonard Bernstein is also known for his social pathos. Three days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on November 26, 1963, he gave a speech entitled An artist ‘s response to violence , which he concluded with the following words: “This will be our way of meeting violence: to make music with greater intensity , greater beauty and greater devotion than ever before.”
The concert program includes a string of gems from Bernstein’s repertoire and opens with America from Bernstein’s modern Romeo and Juliet story West Side Story . Furthermore, we get to hear the dense ballad Some Other Time. It is known to many by Monica Zetterlund’s version – but originally comes from Bernstein’s musical On the Town from 1944 . Other famous songs from West Side Story are the dizzying Maria , where the voice of the trombone leads the melody forward, as well as the rhythmically and harmonically fluttering Something’s Coming . The music before the break is arranged for 15 brass, harp, percussion and jazz trio by Vince Mendoza, one of our era’s leading arrangers with eight Grammy Awards under his belt. Bengt Rosengren leads the musicians in the first half of the concert.
After the break, Sweden’s Radio Symphony Orchestra’s Ulf Forsberg leads the concert from the concertmaster’s seat in a section with music by stars such as Joe Sample, Kurt Weill, Michael Wollny and Cat Stevens. As the uncrowned king of the 1930s cabaret, Kurt Weill wrote civilization-critical music-dramatic works such as the Twelve Penny Opera. Just like Some Other Time, his beautiful ballad Speak Low from 1943 is known to many through Monica Zetterlund’s recording – but it was Weill who wrote it. Six years later, in 1949, his musical Lost in the Stars premiered on Broadway. It became Weill’s last work for the stage before he passed away the following year. At this concert, the title song from the musical is performed.
Several of the titles in the concert’s second section contain the words “moon” and “star”, among them Cat Stevens’ classic Moonshadow as well as Michael Wollny’s and Nils Landgren’s The Moon, the Stars and You. The concert ends with the swinging Same Old Story – a title that points to the immortal power of music.
When Leonard Bernstein died in 1990 in New York from the effects of lung cancer, barely 30 years had passed since he gave the speech An artist ‘s response to violence . As his daughter Jamie Bernstein writes in the book Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein (2018), it is a sad fact that the content of the speech is constantly being re-issued. But, she notes, “Every time the speech is printed or read, there is a glimmer of comfort and universal optimism—what my father fought for his whole life, in every note and through every action.”