Marin Alsop & Baltimore Symphony Orchestra - Bernstein: Symphony No. 3 "Kaddish" (2015)

There's a theory among lovers of Russian music that the conductors who worked directly with Dmitry Shostakovich have a leg up in interpreting his music. Whether or not it's true, Marin Alsop, who was a protegee of Leonard Bernstein, is a fine interpreter of his music, and here she delivers an excellent collection of his choral music headlined by the difficult Symphony No. 3 ("Kaddish"), given in its original 1963 version. A 1977 revision shortened the work, but Alsop takes the sprawling quality of Bernstein's music at face value and holds it all together (she is also very sympathetic to the similarly musically and textually multilingual Mass of 1971). This is not a symphony in a conventional sense, but a sort of narrated Jewish oratorio, with a text fusing the Kaddish prayer and a text of Bernstein's own composition. Alsop is immeasurably aided here by the 82-year-old Claire Bloom as the reader: Bloom, who sounds just as she did in her theatrical heyday, catches the personal quality that comes through all of Bernstein's best classical pieces. The symphony is satisfyingly bracketed by a pair of works that have links both to each other and to the symphony, which was inspired by Arthur Honegger's similarly narrative Joan of Arc at the Stake (1958). Bernstein's The Lark originated as incidental music for a production of Jean Anouilh's play L'Alouette, about Joan of Arc, and that work was reconfigured by Bernstein into the fascinating, naive Missa Brevis of 1988, one of Bernstein's last works. Thus the questing, dissatisfied voice of Joan of Arc hangs over all three works in a way (Bernstein's additions to the Kaddish text are full of doubt), and Alsop gets it to the hilt. A major addition to the Bernstein catalog. -- James Manheim