Bernstein: Symphonic Dances from Westside Story

The original production of Westside Story ran for 732
performances, spawned a movie that won 11 Academy Awards, and is
still a go to on every list of the greatest Broadway Musicals
ever written.  The collaboration between Leonard Bernstein,
Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins was a revolution on par with
the collaborations of Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Nijinsky on the
Rite of Spring.  No Broadway show had ever been so gritty,
so tragic, and so raw.  The first performances of Westside
Story were done against the backdrop of a rise in gang violence
in New York City.  The socio-economic aspects of the show
were evident to everyone who watched it, and I always like to
remind people that the location where Bernstein, Arthur Laurents,
who adapted Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for this show, and
Sondheim imagined the story taking place is where Lincoln Center
now sits, a seat of opulence and extravagance. Simply put, this
was a musical, a comedy, a tragedy, a political statement, and
most importantly, a stunningly revolutionary work of art by these
collaborators.  Today, I want to tell you about the music,
and more specifically, the Symphonic Dances from Westside Story,
an arrangement that Bernstein made with his colleague Sid Ramin 3
years after the show’s premiere.  The Symphonic Dances
brought Bernstein’s electric music from the theatre to the
concert stage, and it’s stayed there ever since.  So today,
we’ll go through each number, talking about just what makes this
music so great, and also about the show itself - its background,
its production, and the issues that Bernstein, Laurents,
Sondheim, and Robbins were trying to tackle, all through the eyes
of a tale of woe about Juliet and her Romeo, or of course, Maria
and Tony. Join us!