When my soul touches yours from Two Love Songs (1949)

So pretty (1968)

Another love

Piccola Serenata (1979)

Greeting (1988)

It’s gotta be bad to be good from On the Town (1944)

Somewhere from West Side Story (1957)

There could be no better demonstration of the extraordinary versatility of Leonard Bernstein’s creative genius – which was as strikingly evident in the concert hall as in the musical theatre – than the seven songs chosen for the last group in today’s recital. Though written midway between the musicals On the Town and Wonderful Town, his Two Love Songs, both to words by Rainer Maria Rilke in English translations by Jessie Lemont, have nothing of Broadway in them. The “great chord” of the first line of When my soul touches yours is a spacious piano dissonance that underlies the whole song, giving way to the sweetly contrapuntal lines of “played strings” in the middle but restored to its full stature at the end. While there is something of Broadway in So Pretty – it was written for Barbra Streisand and the composer to perform at the Brodway for Peace demonstration against the Vietnam war in 1968 – it displays a textural dichotomy similar to that of When my soul touches yours. The nursery simplicity of the vocal line is set in the alien context of the opening piano dissonance and the harsh reality of the harmonies at the end.

Where Another Love comes from, and when it was written, nobody seems to know. All one can say for certain about it is that it was not written, as mistakenly alleged, for a Broadway version of Peter Pan in 1950 and that it was included in By Bernstein, a show made up of similarly stray pieces, at the Chelsea Westside Theatre in 1975. There is no mystery, on the other hand, about the Piccola serenata, which is a witty setting of nonsense words written in celebration of Karl Boehm's’ 85th birthday and first performed by Christa Ludwig and James Levine at the Salzburg Festival in 1979. Greeting comes from Arias and Barcarolles, a cycle that takes its name from the occasion in 1960 when Bernstein conducted music by Mozart and Gershwin at the White House and was congratulated by President Eisenhower with the immortal words, “You know, I liked that last piece you played; it's got a theme. I like music with a theme, not all them arias and barcarolles.” Neither aria nor barcarolle but a little song of touching simplicity, Greeting was written after the birth of the composer’s son Alexander in 1955 and revised for publication in Arias and Barcarolles in 1988.

The last two items were both written for Broadway, although only one of them actually made it. It’s Gotta be Bad to be Good is not conspicuously better or worse than the rest of On the Town but it was cut from the show before its first performance at the Adelphi Theatre in 1944 and disappeared from view until it resurfaced in By Bernstein 31 years later. As for Somewhere from West Side Story, it is based on a melody that, as so often in a Bernstein score, transcends all musical class distinctions.