It was as though Damien Hirst had confessed a secret passion for Victorian watercolours, or Lars von Trier had admitted his life’s ambition to direct a rom-com. When it was announced that John Eliot Gardiner — pioneer of the early music movement — would conduct West Side Story at the Edinburgh Festival the reactions were extreme. What next? Harnoncourt conducts Hair? Les Arts Florissants sing Phantom?
But is the leap from Bach to Bernstein really that big? Both live or die with rhythm, with the dances that pulse and lilt and churn through them. Minuet or mambo — really, what’s in a beat? And then there’s texture. The frayed edges and rough, rasping beauty of historical performance are surely far closer to Bernstein’s angry, urban shout than much of what comes between. Listen to the crowd scenes from the St John Passion, a community baying for blood, then to the musical pack-violence of the choruses leading up to West Side Story’s ‘Rumble’.
Which is why, when it came to it, Gardiner’s West Side Story was so surprising. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra (swollen to symphonic proportions) played deftly, and student and young professional singers from Scotland and America gave their all, but the result was still uncharacteristically limp, lacking that absolute collective conviction and intent that usually marks out a Gardiner performance.
Caught somewhere between concert hall and Broadway, the performance flirted with attack, with abandon, but never quite committed. Hips circled and fingers snapped but the American accent that drawls and snarls through this music was always in danger of slipping. The piece’s painful, flick-knife-to-the-guts thrill never quite landed its final blow. It was often very loud, but that’s not quite the same thing.
It was a similar story when John Wilson conducted the work at the Proms last summer (a concert-staging directed, as here, by Stephen Witson), which begs the question: if neither Gardiner nor Wilson — masters, both, of musical drama — can make the newly authorised concert version of West Side Story work, then maybe the problem is with the edition itself?
Heavily policed (now more than ever, with next year’s Spielberg re-make approaching), the rights to the musical have always been embattled, and while plenty of ensembles will seize the new opportunity to perform it in concert, this all-singing, no-dancing, barely-speaking version is at best an awkward compromise.
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