“Bernstein Dances” follows Bernstein’s career from his earliest dances and Broadway shows up to “Mass,” but only its “A Simple Song” and “Meditation 2” look at the spiritual side of Bernstein. Neumeier doesn’t exactly put all this together. That led to his direct confrontation with God in his Third Symphony, written in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, and then in his musically and spiritually transgressive 1972 “Mass.” But its spiritual essence also got under Bernstein’s skin. Matthew” was, for him, living, breathing, human theater. He unleashed raw operatic passion in soul-searching arias rather than a churchly Passion.īernstein questioned everything.
He brought to Bach’s big choruses and solemn chorales the grandeur of Greek choruses. He treated the recitative narration of Christ’s last days as inescapably vivid drama. Bernstein cut Bach to enhance the Passion’s theatricality and performed the German text in English. To make matters all the more intriguing, Dance at the Music Center invited Hamburg Ballet to bring along its “Bernstein Dances” to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for two additional evenings.īernstein, it so happens, performed and recorded Bach’s Passion with the New York Philharmonic in 1962 in a what was seen then as a controversial approach and still is. Matthew Passion” has reached Los Angeles Opera, raising the further question of where dance, sacred passion and opera intersect. Now, four decades after the ballet’s creation but still rarely seen outside of Hamburg, Neumeier’s “St. By 2005, it had become a classic that suited the glitzy Baden-Baden Festival. In 1983, it was seen as avant-garde enough for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Michael’s Church and then brought it to the opera house.
Matthew Passion” as a balletic medieval passion play in the city’s St. In 1980, seven years after becoming the director of Hamburg Ballet, American choreographer John Neumeier staged the “St. But Peter Sellars, in particular, has powerfully proved it can be not just possible but essential. To dance to Bach comes naturally, as Jerome Robbins, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and many others have lovingly demonstrated.
Matthew Passion,” include some of the most profound drama by this most profound of composers. His sacred cantatas and passions, and none more so than the “St. His instrumental suites, partitas and concertos, made of dance forms, can include some of the most profound music of this most profound of composers.īach did not write opera either. A man of the church, not the theater, Bach did not write for dance.
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