Plato Symposium

"While we often associate Leonard Bernstein's sense of trascendence with his ability to cross musical boundaries… or his skill in discussing and describing that nondiscursive art known as music with his singular eloquence, the two works presented on this recording, The Age of Anxiety and his Serenade after Plato's "Symposium", offer us an alternate perspective on Bernstein's artistry. Throughout his opus, as both a "longhair" composer and a composer of more popular forms, Bernstein had intertwined words with music - taking on Voltaire in Candide, for instance, or setting various psalms for his celebrated collection, The Chichester Psalms. In The Age of Anxiety and Serenade, Bernstein takes us one step further: he uses instrumental music to illustrate, expand, even explicate literary expression. They represent as such a curious reversal of what we can come to expect from this artist."

by Jackson Braider