Crossover shows West still the best
West Side Story (Usher Hall) Verdict: Original and best ★★★★✩
FOR some time, it has seemed classical crossover has been all the rage in the world of music.
Protagonists have ranged from Pavarotti and the Three Tenors, all the way to Sarah Brightman and Myleene Klass – and it has become big musical business.
But it was not always thus. Musical genres were once strictly delineated. Then, in the late 1950s, a show hit Broadway that blew all the conventions away. West Side Story was a smash.
It was never guaranteed to work – yet it has music by Leonard Bernstein, based on a conception of Jerome Roberts, with a book by Arthur Laurents and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
Oh, and the whole thing was, of course, based on an original idea by one William Shakespeare.
Back in the present, conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner has temporarily rested his usual Bach/ baroque baton to dive headlong into the gangland world of the Sharks and the Jets.
Sir John said: ‘I am thrilled to conduct the work at the Festival. I adore its scintillating combination of wild, rhythmic energy, Broadway musical, hip hop, jazz and Latin American beat, held together by a composer with a classical background and a symphonic tool kit.’
EIF director Fergus Linehan told me he thought West Side Story would be one of the highlights. He was right.
Alek Shrader and Sophia Burgos were heart-rending as the star-cross’d lovers Tony and Maria; Dan D’Souza and Nuno Silva implacable as the gang leaders Riff and Bernardo, driving the story towards disaster.
The famous songs – Maria, America, Gee, Officer Krupke and the rest – took an enthralled audience from Lothian Road to the Upper West Side in that magical way only the theatre can.
But holding everything together was Bernstein’s glorious music, presented with an all-encompassing passion by a conductor who truly knows and embodies the concept of classical crossover.