Three Dance Episodes from ‘On the Town’

Program notes

About the Work

On the Town was Leonard Bernstein’s first Broadway musical, a smash hit of 1944 about three sailors on a single day’s shore leave in wartime New York, racing around the city in search of fun and romance. It grew out of his ballet Fancy Free (choreographed by Jerome Robbins), and dance was central to it from the start. Bernstein later extracted three of its dance numbers as a concert suite, the Three Dance Episodes, which was first heard in concert in 1946.

The music is pure Bernstein, and pure New York: brash, jazzy, syncopated, tender by turns, bursting with the energy of the wartime city. Together the three episodes make an irresistible curtain-raiser, a portrait of a young composer, not yet thirty, already fizzing with the theatrical flair and rhythmic punch that would soon produce West Side Story. It is a fitting opener for an evening conducted by Iván Fischer, who shares Bernstein’s belief that the concert hall should be a place of joy and surprise.

What to Listen For

The three episodes are arranged fast–slow–fast for maximum contrast. The first, ‘The Great Lover,’ is a brassy, swaggering dance, full of jazzy syncopation and big-band swagger. The second, ‘Lonely Town: Pas de Deux,’ is the emotional heart: a tender, bluesy slow dance, an instrumental version of the show’s wistful song ‘Lonely Town,’ with aching solo woodwind lines.

The finale, ‘Times Square: 1944,’ is the showstopper: a riot of urban energy built around the show’s most famous tune, ‘New York, New York’ (“a helluva town”). Listen for the jazzy percussion, the wailing brass, the sense of a great city at full tilt, and for Bernstein’s irresistible rhythmic drive, which never lets up until the exuberant final bars.