‘Candide’ delivered with wit, exuberance
Because we have the Broadway musical instead, Americans never really took to the tradition of the operetta. The finest homegrown version of that European form — perhaps the only one of any actual distinction — is Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide,” which took to the stage of Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, Jan. 18, in all its satirical and sentimental splendor.
The San Francisco Symphony’s concert performance, led by Michael Tilson Thomas and featuring a skilled cast of solo singers together with Ragnar Bohlin’s versatile Symphony Chorus, marked the latest installment in the ongoing Bernstein centennial festivities (which are now, puzzlingly but endearingly, moving into a second year). And it served as yet another reminder of how resourceful, fecund and downright exuberant Bernstein’s creative gift could be.
In this case, that meant pulling off one of the trickier triple axels of artistic display, which is to simultaneously celebrate and parody a creative predecessor.
The score of “Candide” — with its bubbly, Champagne-driven waltzes, witty patter songs, lyrical ballads and bravura choruses — is shaped at every juncture by the models of Offenbach, Lehár and Gilbert and Sullivan, which Bernstein treats with a combination of love and mockery. “Isn’t this preposterous?” he asks. “Isn’t it marvelous?”
The answer, of course, is a double affirmative, and Thursday’s performance conveyed all of that. Thomas and the orchestra threw themselves into the score with abandon, from the rhythmically dizzying strains of the great overture to the tender melodies of the final “Make Our Garden Grow.”
And the score is, ultimately, all we need of “Candide,” whose famously spotty stage history — a morass of revisions and rerevisions that promises to keep archivists and historians happily confused for decades — is a testament to the piece’s dramatic recalcitrance. (The Symphony performances follow a version created in 1989 for the Scottish Opera.)
Based on Voltaire’s 1759 novella, “Candide” follows the endlessly naive protagonist across lands and seas, through a thicket of setbacks designed to shake his faith in the proposition that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” Voltaire’s savage attack on certain strains of Enlightenment thought has its own integrity, but on the stage (or for that matter the page), there’s a certain point beyond which a picaresque structure begins to sag.
So Candide’s travels are perhaps best seen as an excuse for Bernstein and his librettists — chiefly the late Richard Wilbur, along with additions by John La Touche, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Stephen Sondheim and the composer himself — to write character pieces and travelogue music. The flavors of the music range from German chorales to Parisian waltzes to Argentine tangos, with plenty of stops in between.
Baritone Michael Todd Simpson, serving as narrator and stepping in as the philosophical Dr. Pangloss, provided a bit of spoken connective tissue between the musical numbers, which were gloriously handled by all. Tenor Andrew Stenson was a sweet-toned, ardent Candide, and soprano Meghan Picerno, as his beloved Cunegonde, maneuvered the stratospheric demands of the role with easy brilliance.
Crossing paths with them through endless coincidences and reappearances were soprano Vanessa Becerra (a charismatic, eloquent Paquette) and baritone Hadleigh Adams (comically vain and befuddled as Maximilian). Sheri Greenawald made a bravura appearance as the Old Lady — the “easily assimilated” embodiment of wily survival skills — and tenor Ben Jones stepped out of the chorus to do a couple of first-rate solo turns at the top of the second act.
Perhaps the only thing lacking from the presentation was a full sense of immediacy. The singers were arrayed behind rather than in front of the orchestra, where they were not always easy to hear (despite some awkward amplification), and many of the more inventive turns in the lyrics were difficult to make out.
But not even those setbacks could dim the luster of “Candide,” or impede the brash delight with which it rolls out. Joy, silliness, and even in the end a bit of wisdom were the order of the day.