When it came time to make a movie of his “West Side Story,” a busy Leonard Bernstein entrusted the score to Hollywood and his loyal arrangers.
Multimedia
Blog
ArtsBeat
The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.
United Artists/Photofest
Natalie Wood in “West Side Story,” whose score will be performed live by the New York Philharmonic.
But he was less than enchanted with the results. On hearing the overture for the first time on the stereo of the music director, John Green, he burst out, “Johnny, how the hell could you have done it so badly?,” one of the film’s producers, Walter Mirisch, said.
Regardless of his opinion then, the guardians of Bernstein’s musical legacy have painstakingly recreated a written score of the soundtrack to be performed live by an orchestra during a screening of the movie, which will be stripped of its instrumental music.
The New York Philharmonic will do just that on Wednesday and Thursday evenings at Avery Fisher Hall. This is one of a spate of movie jobs by the Philharmonic this season, including a performance of the score to “Henry V” by William Walton (no movie shown, but narration by Christopher Plummer) on Sept. 17; a program of classic movie score excerpts accompanied by film clips on Oct. 25; and a performance of Philip Glass’s score during a showing of “Koyaanisqatsi” on Nov. 2 and 3.
Through some remarkable audio engineering, the original dialogue and singing of “West Side Story” will remain, while the Philharmonic plays along. It is like a version of Music Minus One: recordings of solo works without the solo line, to be played along with in your living room. But in this case, think of it as Music Minus 100.
“I wanted to find new ways for people to enjoy Lenny’s music,” said Paul H. Epstein, the senior vice president of the Leonard Bernstein Office, which oversees and perpetuates all things Bernstein. “I wanted to prepare the new generation for Lenny. I thought this would be a way of reaching them.”
The “West Side Story” production coincides with the issue of a restoration of the original MGM movie by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment on Blu-ray and DVD 50 years after its release in theaters. The film won 10 Oscars.
The live-orchestra version had its premiere on July 8 and 9 at the Hollywood Bowl by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, old hands at playing movie scores during screenings, and moves on to Chicago and London in the coming months. Its backers say that inquiries have come from Melbourne and Sydney, Australia; Tokyo; and several summer festivals. David Newman, an experienced movie score composer who led the Angelenos in the premiere, will conduct the New York Philharmonic.
An extraordinary amount of detective work and sound-engineering wizardry went into the realization of the live-orchestra screenings.
Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal orchestrated the original Broadway musical in close collaboration with Bernstein. “He was very much involved,” said Mr. Ramin, 92, who was a childhood friend of Bernstein’s. “He put his seal of approval on what we had done.”
They were assigned to orchestrate the movie score under the guidance of Saul Chaplin, the associate producer. For Broadway, the arrangers wrote for roughly 30 musicians. MGM allowed them an orchestra three times the size. “It was like giving us a big candy store and saying, ‘Eat what you want,’ ” Mr. Ramin said.
What resulted was a lush, large score with six saxophone parts, passages with eight trumpets and others with five pianos added to five xylophones. The movie arrangers created a new overture, doubled the size of the opening dance prologue, moved scenes around and added musical overlays to the two-and-a-half-hour movie. They won an Oscar for best original score.
“The score as a whole was nearly as daring for the film as it had been for the stage,” wrote Misha Berson in her book “Something’s Coming, Something Good: West Side Story and the American Imagination” (Applause, 2011). No American movie, she added, “had such an adventurous sound palette.”
Bernstein, Ms. Berson wrote, found the sound mix “overbearing and lacking in texture and subtlety.”
Jamie Bernstein, a daughter of the composer’s, said by e-mail that her father “didn’t love everything” about the arrangement, or the movie, for that matter, but kept tactfully quiet.
Mr. Ramin said of Bernstein’s reaction to the movie score: “He liked some of it, and he didn’t like some of it. Lenny was really a purist at heart.”
