Judith Forst and conductor Bramwell Tovey dance during Candide.
- Bernstein’s Candide
- The Toronto Symphony Orchestra
- Bramwell Tovey, conductor
- At Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto
Marking what would be Leonard Bernstein’s 100th year, 2018 is littered with Candides. I’m already wistful over missing Francesca Zambello’s production in Los Angeles, not to mention the version that just went up at Carnegie Hall, where the tip of the iceberg of the knockout cast was John Lithgow as Dr. Pangloss and the Narrator. With Thursday and Saturday concerts, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra got in on the game.
Hearing Bernstein’s Candide in concert is wild. It’s an operetta written in the second half of the 20th century – arguably a touch-and-go period for opera and the opera-adjacent – that stays with you after the curtain falls. Its lyrics are lovingly seared into your memory; lines like “The best of all possible worlds,” “Nothing more than this” and “We’ll do the best we know,” cycle around in your head like life lessons.
Without the mercy of full staging, Candide tends to grow slightly stale as Act II moves along. Yet it fares better than most staged works as a concert piece, both as an entire work and in parts; the overture and Cunégonde’s sparkly aria Glitter and Be Gay are two favourite excerpts.
Bernstein’s music is thoughtful and creative, but even he doesn’t let his ego stand in the way of a rollicking overture or that beautiful earworm of a final number, Make Our Garden Grow.
Bernstein’s centenary means something different to Canadians than it does to our American neighbours. We cannot claim him as one of our own, the way we do Glenn Gould and Jon Vickers and – like it or not – Claude Vivier. And so it was fitting that the in-concert Candide put up by the Toronto Symphony turned out to be not just a nod to Lenny, but also to some of Canada’s greatest living musical talent.
I mean no hyperbole, as evidenced by the three headliners all being appointees of the Order of Canada. Conductor Bramwell Tovey, soprano Tracy Dahl and mezzo-soprano Judith Forst all made their TSO debuts between 1979 and 1991; to this Candide they brought to the stage a kind of ease, confidence and play that can only come from doing something for 30-plus years.
Before it all began, Tovey told the crowd, “I just want to give you permission to laugh.” Likely, we would have done so even without the explicit go-ahead, because Tovey, Dahl and Forst were a total hoot. Dahl seemed ageless as Cunégonde, giggling and wailing her way through Glitter and Be Gay, right up to her wild wielding of a string of pearls. Almost as fantastic as Dahl’s singing was Forst’s sympathetic face as the Old Lady, egging on Cunégonde to her psychotic heights. Forst earned roars of her own with her pan-European accent and laments about her missing buttock. And really, when Tovey hopped off the podium, baton in his teeth, to tango with Forst, there was nothing left to do but be swept away by the sheer fun – that of Candide and that of these artists.
The characters in Candide all seem to find their way to an enlightenment of sorts, to the kind of wisdom that comes from knowing how little one really knows. Cunégonde and the Old Lady discover that an effortless life of luxury grows dull in a hurry, and Candide learns of the growing pains of a mind finally put to use. Watching Tovey, Dahl and Forst share the stage with some decidedly younger castmates, I couldn’t help but see a parallel between these characters and the artists performing them. Put up against each other – the stage veterans and the soon-to-be-veterans, the Candide and Cunégonde of Act I and their wiser selves in Act II – the performance seemed to be telling big, sweeping truths about patience, diligence and the rewards of thinking for oneself.