West Side Story Suite

arranged for brass ensemble by Eric Crees

West Side Story was scarcely more successful than Porgy and Bess on its initial Broadway run. But it too - particularly since the release of the film version in 1961, four years after its first stage performance - has become an apparently inexhaustible source of popular songs and instrumental pieces of all kinds and all dimensions, again including one by the composer himself (the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story).

Eric Crees’s Suite draws equally on the songs and the dance numbers, beginning with the Prologue, which is a dramatic representation of the street fighting between the two rival gangs, the Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. The next number, “Something’s Coming,” introduces Tony, the Romeo of this musical version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, cleverly updated and shifted from Verona to New York. Mambo is performed at the dance in the gym where Tony of the Jets first sets eyes on Maria, the sister of the leader of the Sharks. He promptly falls in love with her, as his “Maria” so romantically confirms. Cha-Cha revisits the dance scene, just before Tony and Maria first speak to each other, while the brilliant Scherzo comes from a fantasy ballet sequence for Tony and Maria at a point in the second act where, although things are going wrong, there is still hope for them. Going back to the first act, just after the balcony scene, “America” is a huapango for three Shark girls who, though nostalgic for Puerto Rico, like New York even more. Still in the first act, the boppy “Cool” leads into what must have been the first more than minimially extended fugue on Broadway. The Suite ends not in tragedy but with “Somewhere,” another fantasy number from the second-act ballet sequence.