Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Leonard Bernstein

Candide 

Victorian Opera
by •
09 February 2024
Euan Fistrovic Doidge as Maximilian and Katherine Allen as Cunégonde (photograph by Charlie Kinross)
What fortuitous programming it was by Victorian Opera to have a new production of Candide (1956) open just as interest in the composer of its delicious score peaks in the wake of Bradley Cooper’s biopic Maestro. Just as fortuitously, the production is a triumph; an auspicious start for incoming artistic director, Stuart Maunder. It makes as strong a case as one might for the value of opera companies taking on such repertoire. ... (read more)

The Leonard Bernstein Letters edited by Nigel Simeone

by •
April 2014, no. 360
Ian Dickson reviews 'The Leonard Bernstein Letters', edited by Nigel Simeone

How does one get a handle on a phenomenon like Leonard Bernstein? The whirling dervish of the podium was also a brilliant pianist and a composer who wrote for both Broadway and the concert hall, although it is interesting that his most performed orchestral pieces, the overture to Candide and the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, are both from his Broadway life. He was a great proselytiser for classical music, as one can still see in his Omnibus appearances and his Young People’s Concerts, and a strong advocate for American composers, but he was also a ruthless self-promoter, as some of his erstwhile friends and mentors found to their cost. A mostly happily married man and loving father, he was also a wildly promiscuous, mostly gay, Lothario.

... (read more)