Eiji Oue (pronounced A. G. OH-way, as the booklet says) has been Music Director of the Minnesota Orchestra since 1995. Earlier in his career he was a protege of Leonard Bernstein, in 1990 helping to set up the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan, Bernstein’s last project. He makes a warm, energetic interpreter in a Bernstein collection which includes several welcome first recordings, drawing first-rate playing from his orchestra.
Charlie Harmon, Bernstein’s archivist from 1985, prepared this orchestral suite from Candide specially for Oue and the Minnesota Orchestra. It is neatly planned in a single span on the lines of the popular suite from West Side Story, but it is only towards the end that some of the most popular numbers appear – the Old Woman’s ‘I am easily assimilated’, Pangloss’s ‘Best of all possible worlds’ and the final ‘Make your garden grow’, given the Mahlerian weight that Bernstein himself favours in his recording of the complete work (DG, 8/91).
The orchestrations of the five songs are new too. Prompted by Harmon, Sid Ramin, a regular Bernstein collaborator, has filled in a gap since Bernstein’s art songs with piano accompaniment have not till now been treated to orchestrations. The two tender little Love Songs, setting translations of Rilke, and Silhouette, based on a Lebanese folk-song (with bird-noises), were all written early in Bernstein’s career for Jennie Tourel. Piccola Serenata, using nonsense syllables, is a hilarious 85th birthday offering for Karl Bohm, which must have foxed the old man, and So pretty, an anti-Vietnam war song, remains moving today. Sadly, the mezzo soloist, Beth Clayton, has a fluttery vibrato, which on disc, except in So pretty, takes away sweetness.
Anthony Ross, Principal Cello of the Minnesota Orchestra, is a warm, intense soloist in the Three Meditations from ‘Mass’, if not as wide-ranging in his expressiveness as Rostropovich. In the Divertimento, written for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s centenary in 1980, Oue brings out the lively humour, relishing the parodies of Copland in the ‘Turkey Trot’ and of Ives in the final march. Well-balanced sound not ideally transparent in big tuttis.'