Photos by Stefan Cohen
Michael Tilson Thomas has his heart in many causes (his remarkable New World Symphony is just one of them), but it's noteworthy how personal it was for him to produce a complete performance of mentor/friend Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, to be released on June 10 (but available for pre-ordering now).
The San Francisco Symphony performance, recorded live last year, features Alexandra Silber (Maria), Cheyenne Jackson (Tony), Jessica Vosk (Anita), and Kevin Vortmann (Riff).
Anyone expecting standard gushing from MTT on the subject will be surprised by his recollections (as recorded by Larry Rothe) of what happened "at the beginning":
For my 14th birthday, showbiz friends of my parents gave me the original cast album of West Side Story. But at that point my musical tastes had shifted from those of my parents’ circle. I actually exchanged the album at my local record store for Hans Rosbaud’s recording of the Berg Three Pieces for Orchestra.
The tunes, of course, were familiar to everybody, MTT not being an exception, but then came house painting and the film:
The summer before I started my second year in college, I moved into an apartment. It was a big sprawling place and we had to paint it. One of my roommates had the West Side Story album and played it while we painted. By the time we finished the job, West Side Story had become a part of my life.
...
My first experience seeing West Side Story was the film. That was in Jerusalem, at a screening that was a little like the Rocky Horror Picture Show. People in the audience were enacting the piece.A Jets section and a Sharks section occupied opposite sides of the auditorium. I’m not sure whether they were different groups of Israelis, or Israelis and Palestinians. But objects were being thrown from one side of the auditorium to the other, and you had to duck.
Later the Symphonic Dances suite and continued exposure kept increasing MTT's interest, and he (and SFS colleagues) eventually went to bat to secure performance rights. The result is the unique performance and recording of the entire show, unlike everybody else's restrictions for various combinations of numbers, but not the complete running order of the show. The result:
The running order I followed was basically the one that Bernstein had done in his own 1984 recording. From a purist’s point of view, we haven’t included every note ... But what we offer here is the whole dramatic picture of the piece.