West

By Michael Walsh

At its Broadway premiere in 1957, the city-gritty updating of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet by Composer Leo nard Bernstein, Lyricist Stephen Sondheim and Choreographer Jerome Robbins was hailed as much for its quasi-operatic score as for its savvy lyrics and explosive, streetwise dances. Now comes a new Deutsche Grammophon recording, conducted by the composer, that makes the show's higher musical aspirations unabashedly explicit.

Writing an operatic Broadway show was considered box-office poison 30 years ago, but Bernstein was up to the task. "Chief problem (is) to tread the fine line between opera and Broadway, between realism and poetry, ballet and 'just dancing,' " noted the composer in his log the year before it opened. In Candide (1956), he had attempted such a synthesis, but that show was crippled by a bitter book that was vulgarized in its later revisions. With West Side Story, however, Bernstein's command of popular idioms, his soaring lyric gifts and technical skills got free rein in a show as powerful as a street rumble. West Side Story ran for 734 performances, became a 1961 film that won ten Academy Awards and was revived onstage several times.

But never, it is safe to say, has it been cast as it has been in this version: Soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and Tenor Jose Carreras are Maria and Tony, the doomed lovers from rival gangs; Mezzo Tatiana Troyanos is Maria's friend Anita, who feels that life is all right in America; peerless Mezzo Marilyn Horne makes a cameo appearance singing the gentle ballad Somewhere; and, surprisingly, Bernstein conducts his full score for the first time. Far from being a vanity production with a group of slumming opera stars, however, the performance is convincing and vital.

Most impressive is Carreras, a stylish singer whose suave voice is often heard to better advantage on recordings than in large opera houses. Suppressing his Hispanic accent gamely, if intermittently, to play the American Tony, Carreras lovingly spins out his phrases, making an impassioned romantic aria out of Maria and lending Puccinian fervor to the love duet One Hand, One Heart. Te Kanawa's pure, gleaming voice and British inflection seem a bit too uptown for a Puerto Rican girl from New York City's tough West Side, but she floats a golden high pianissimo at the end of Tonight effortlessly. Troyanos, who was born in the neighborhood where the musical is set (and where Lincoln Center now stands), crackles uninhibitedly in the rhythmically ) infectious immigration anthem America. And Bernstein, leading an orchestra of New York free-lancers, conducts authoritatively and irresistibly.

Given all this, is West Side Story an opera? "I say it is not," Bernstein has asserted. "It's a work on its way toward being one." But one of the salutary developments in recent years is the expanding definition of opera to include musical theater, a category that now encompasses everything from La Boheme to Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George. Fueled by Bernstein's protean musical gifts, West Side Story was one of the opening salvos in a revolution that invigorated a tiring genre.