Leonard Bernstein's classical compositions have outlasted their detractors and have become fixtures of the concert scene in Europe as well as the U.S. Only the Mass, quintessentially American in its use of popular music, blues, and musical theater styles, remains unusual in Europe, although there was an earlier Austrian reading with the Tonkünstler Orchestra, conducted by Kristjan Järvi and featuring the Company of Music as the street chorus contending with a priest and thus setting in motion the plot that runs parallel to ...
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Leonard Bernstein's classical compositions have outlasted their detractors and have become fixtures of the concert scene in Europe as well as the U.S. Only the Mass, quintessentially American in its use of popular music, blues, and musical theater styles, remains unusual in Europe, although there was an earlier Austrian reading with the Tonkünstler Orchestra, conducted by Kristjan Järvi and featuring the Company of Music as the street chorus contending with a priest and thus setting in motion the plot that runs parallel to the text of the Catholic mass. That group appears once again on the present recording, and their mastery of not only American music but American speech idioms is impressive. Some of the singers are not American, but their singing is not accented in an obtrusive way. The ORF Vienna Radio Symphony conveys a real sense of discovery of the music, not the dutifully note-perfect rendition of jazz and blues rhythms one sometimes finds in this part of the world, but the real credit here goes...
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