Tone Poem Tuesday

Leonard Bernstein was born 106 years plus two days ago, on August 25, 1918. Oddly, I’ve never written much about him here, have I? I really should change that one of these days…maybe after I finally get Maestro off the “to-be-watched” queue…but for now, I feature a symphonic suite Bernstein culled from the score he wrote for the Eliz Kazan-Marlon Brando film On the Waterfront.

I’ve actually never seen On the Waterfront, for various reasons (I have to admit a distaste for Kazan owing to his naming names for HUAC, but mostly it’s that I’ve just never got ’round to it), but this symphonic suite is a fine work, pieced together into a single cohesive work from a score that Bernstein found frustrating to create: a film score is, by its nature, a subservient piece of music, and Bernstein was never one to easily suffer the pushing of music into the background. In his writings, Bernstein’s attitude toward film music does not seem to have been particularly positive, but his one attempt at film work resulted in a very fine American tone poem.

Here is the Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront by Leonard Bernstein. 

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