West Side Story review – Bernstein's musical is out of step in concert hall

Bach not Bernstein is the composer one associates with John Eliot Gardiner. Yet here Gardiner is at the Edinburgh festival conducting Bernstein’s West Side Story for the first time, apparently a long-held ambition following a night on the town with Lenny six decades ago.

This is a concert performance, of the slightly choreographed variety, which can only go so far in the Edwardian grandeur of the Usher Hall (difficult to imagine anything looking like New York’s Upper West Side circa 1950). Concert performances of stage works are usually either of rarities that wouldn’t otherwise get a hearing or of something epic and too expensive for frequent productions. West Side Story is clearly neither, which begs the question as to why this performance came about.

Bernstein’s music is undoubtedly great, but overall this is a typical numbers musical rather than a continuous musical work. Not a problem in the theatre, but something that the concert performance, without the staging to bridge the gaps, really emphasises. The high romance, especially the voice-over dialogue, also seems particularly mawkish when removed from its visual context. Nor could it be said that Gardiner’s direction brings crucial new insights to an already familiar work. Though he is a period-instrument specialist renowned for the energy and verve of his performances, Gardiner seems more intent on emphasising the lush romanticism of aspects of the score than in bringing clarity and vigour to Bernstein’s cracking rhythms.

It isn’t all loss though. At a time when you’re just as likely to find a reality TV star as a trained singer heading up a West End musical, it is a rare luxury to hear familiar numbers like Tonight and Somewhere being sung by trained singers who can actually do justice to the music. And the young cast, drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, bring infectious enthusiasm and boundless energy to the performance; nowhere more so than in the male ensemble number Gee, Officer Krupke, both witty and slick.

In an ideal world with a bottomless EIF budget, this performance would have received the theatrical staging it merited.

At Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 6 August.