The word 'chutzpah' might have been invented for Leonard Bernstein's Kaddish Symphony.
Not content with challenging the great deity in the sky, Bernstein also takes on the credo of 1960s 12-tone orthodoxies in his third symphony – a far greater sin in the eyes of some.
'Every son defies his father, fights him…only to return to him closer and more secure than before,' Bernstein wrote as he explained how Jewish theology informed his score. And as his speaker rages against God, down in the orchestra there's a furious debate about what Bernstein perceived as the crisis in modern music.
The raw material of Bernstein's score is a dialectical clash between paternal tonality and 'errant' 12-tone music, although it's hard to imagine a more hummable tone-row. This centrifugal tension powers the symphony on, and Gerard Schwarz conveys the unfolding drama with strategic clarity. Ironically in the circumstances, Bernstein's own pull-no-punches 1977 DG recording with the Israel PO must hang heavy over any conductor approaching the piece. One giant tick in Schwarz's plus-column is Willard White, a less mannered speaker than Bernstein's Michael Wager. The orchestra and voices, too, sound as if they're taking pleasure in Bernstein's highly inventive scoring, running the spectrum of his jazzy big-band swagger and post-Darmstadt atonal webs with ease.
In comparison to Kaddish's angst, ChichesterPsalms is a cathartic work that, to paraphrase, requires little more than reading the lines without tripping over the lopsided time signatures.
Schwarz energises the Technicolor opening movement, although choral vulnerabilities detract from the work's conclusion. None the less, a disc Bernstein fans will relish.

The raw material of Bernstein's score is a dialectical clash between paternal tonality and 'errant' 12-tone music, although if anyone's written a more hummable tone-row I've yet to hear it. One giant tick in Schwarz's plus-column is Willard White, a less mannered speaker than Bernstein's Michael Wager. The orchestra and voices, too, sound as if they're taking pleasure in Bernstein's highly inventive scoring, running the spectrum of his jazzy big-band swagger and post-Darmstadt atonal webs with ease.