Bernstein: Candide

A brief, but very warm welcome for the return of Bernstein’s Candide to the catalogue. Recorded under trying circumstances, most of the cast were suffering from flu during the sessions, the score emerges with no signs of reduced vigour or humour-through-gritted-teeth. June Anderson sails through Glitter and be gay with flying colours, without entirely removing the suspicion that this is not her natural territory. Hadley is charming and fresh-voiced as Candide. The inclusion of veteran singers (and long time Bernstein collaborators) Nicolai Gedda and, as the Lady with One Buttock, Christa Ludwig is a particular pleasure; Ludwig’s I am easily assimilated is the showstopper that it should be. The chorus gives Bernstein everything, and there’s no better Bernstein ensemble in Europe than the LSO. If you need cheering up, you could hardly do better than this!

About this “final revised version”

Candide had already been through several substantially different stage versions since its troubled 1956 Broadway premiere, a short-lived original run, Harold Prince’s leaner 1973 Chelsea Theatre revision, and further reworkings through the 1980s. The version recorded here grew out of a production Bernstein developed with conductor John Mauceri, first staged by Scottish Opera in Glasgow in 1988 and then at London’s Old Vic in early 1989. For this Barbican Centre concert performance that December, Bernstein restored numbers written for the original 1956 production that hadn’t been heard in decades, alongside music from the later revisions, arriving at what both he and Mauceri considered closest to his own intentions for the score. The recording sessions at Abbey Road Studios followed within days of the concert, making this Bernstein’s own final word on a work he had kept revising for over three decades.