One of the happier outcomes of the recent Big Bernstein Bash, celebrating what would have been the maestro's 90th birthday, was a new respect for his Mass, a piece few have known quite what to think about, or do with, since its 1971 premiere, when it served as the gala for the opening of the Kennedy Center. Anyone with the column inches to do more than review recent concerts took the opportunity to weigh in on the piece, almost always to the much-bad-mouthed work's advantage. So it's fitting that the celebration ends with the release of the best recording of Mass to date (Chandos), by mostly Austrian forces under the savvy leadership of Kristjan Jarvi, whom you can't help thinking Lenny would have approved of in every way.
With a new bilingual production of West Side Story, now generally acknowledged as Bernstein's greatest achievement, just having opened on Broadway (with the Puerto Rican characters speaking their lines and singing some of the show's major hit tunes in Spanish), now's the time for this ultra-American music to spread its big, embracing wings. Occasionally on this infectiously wonderful new recording of Mass , the choristers and vocal soloists can give the impression that the Vienna Choir Boys have missed their connection at Grand Central. But Jarvi (yet another remarkable conductor son of Neeme Jarvi) has such a sure grasp of the piece's jumble of musical styles that the performance he gets from the Tonkunstler-Orchester, the Absolute Ensemble and a trio of choruses is truly idiomatic. You'd never suspect that Randall Scarlata, in the central role of the Mass' Celebrant, is Austrian. Hearing Mass leap the Atlantic that agilely is more than just testimony to its universality. It speaks to its quality.
Clearly influenced by the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten �" the American premiere of whose Peter Grimes Bernstein conducted at Tanglewood when he was barely out of short pants �" Bernstein's Mass blends the standard Latin Mass text with shards of Hebrew and a larger smattering of English texts by Stephen Schwartz and, for better and worse, the hyperverbal, omnisexual Bernstein. Comparatively, the music is a veritable Tower of Babel, with Broadway, gospel, jazz, blues and other idioms not merely intermingled but positively tumbling out of and into one another.
The work's enormous embrace �" its 70s, love-the-one-you're-with universalism �" has always been the biggest impediment to a completely satisfying performance of the work. The likelihood of anyone's finding all the music engaging, or for that matter even convincing, is small, and passages that feel uplifting and "right on" one day may strike the same listener as shockingly inept, glib, or distasteful the next.
If Bernstein's Mass seems less dated than it has for the last four decades and more, look no farther than the timing of its re-emergence for an explanation. If its politics sometimes seem poster-ish, they match the tenor of those late, dark days of the Vietnam War and the Nixon Presidency, when the sense of the horror of it all no longer needed inflection. The words of the Paul Simon quatrain that Bernstein threw into the stew would be as apt for the Iraq War and the Bush administration: "Half the people are stoned/ And the other half are waiting for the next election." Sound familiar?
By the time of Mass, Bernstein's wrestling with the Divine had lightened considerably since the tortured doubt and protest of his 1963 'Kaddish' Symphony (completed the day of the assassination of JFK, a personal friend, whom Bernstein was remembering in his Catholic-ish Mass to open Kennedy Center). But if in Mass Bernstein meant the words of the "Simple Song" that frame the composition, "Sing like you like to sing./ God loves all simple things,/ For God is the simplest of all," he had become, if not the raging, tormented agnostic, the self-pitying, tormented Celebrant.
Mass is beyond any doubt a show, and the show is beyond any doubt about Lenny. He's railing about the impossibility of fulfilling the expectations people have of him as the apostle of music itself �" expectations he himself created and, despite his lacerating self-doubt, magnificently fulfilled.
Bernstein composed his Mass at an historical juncture when Black Power and Student Power were, at least temporarily, passing the torch to Gay Liberation, not coincidentally at the core of his own personal work, and suffering, at the time. Is it any surprise that he acted it out in a Broadway-style show with a St. Sebastian figure at its heart?
Bernstein's contributions to the show were the music and the words, which can be easier to see whole in an audio-only version. In one as bracing as Jarvi's, it can seem as if nothing is missing.