Festival Musiq3: An American in Paris
PROGRAMME NOTES
Leonard Bernstein Chichester Psalms* (1965)
Eric Whitacre Sainte-Chapelle (2013)
George Gershwin An American in Paris (1928)
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28.06.2026 FLAGEY BRUSSELS
The Brussels Philharmonic closes Festival Musiq3 together with the Vlaams Radiokoor and conductor Joana Carneiro.
Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms sets the tone right away: rhythmically sharp, direct and without detours, balanced by moments that open everything up.Then it quiets down. In Eric Whitacre’s Sainte-Chapelle, you hear voices alone. Clear, almost otherworldly – music that seems to float and briefly lets time slip away.With Gershwin’s An American in Paris, the atmosphere shifts again. Suddenly you’re in the middle of the city: movement, energy, a sound that feels as much at home in the concert hall as out on the street.
A Phenomenon in the Choral World
Eric Whitacre (b. 1970) is nothing short of a phenomenon. With his contemporary yet accessible musical language and a series of innovative projects, he has transformed the choral landscape. His debut album, Light & Gold, received a Grammy Award in 2012, while its successor, Water Night, rose straight to the top of the iTunes Classical Charts upon release. Through his pioneering Virtual Choir project – in which singers from around the world record Whitacre’s compositions individually before being assembled into a single performance video – he has also reached a vast audience that transcends geographical and generational boundaries.
Whitacre’s encounter with classical music came almost by chance. After considerable persuasion, he attended a rehearsal of his university’s College Choir, hoping, as he later admitted, to meet attractive young women. Instead, he discovered his vocation. He left Nevada for New York and went on to study composition at the renowned Juilliard School under the guidance of John Corigliano. Whitacre draws inspiration from many sources: his early years playing in a techno band, as well as poetry, film music and the classical repertoire. Above all, however, he trusts his intuition: "Music must first and foremost be authentic, and have something meaningful to say to both performers and audiences."
Sainte-Chapelle, too, has a compelling origin story. Whitacre composed the work in 2013 at the request of the Tallis Scholars to mark their 40th anniversary. At the time, he was living in Paris and had become captivated by the beauty of the 13th-century chapel known as Sainte-Chapelle. Charles Anthony Silvestri provided a text telling the story of an innocent young girl who hears the Sanctus sung by the angels depicted in the chapel’s stained-glass windows.
From the Vibrant World of Broadway...
Leonard (Louis) Bernstein (1918–1990), too, was never confined by the boundaries of classical music. Throughout his career, he wove together classical traditions with elements drawn from jazz, dance and musical theatre. Like Eric Whitacre, he possessed a remarkable gift for inspiring broad audiences and fostering a love of music. For many years, Bernstein hosted educational television programmes devoted to classical music and introduced younger generations to the repertoire through his celebrated Young People’s Concerts.
Alongside an exceptionally busy conducting career – serving, among other roles, as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic from 1957 to 1969 – Bernstein remained an active composer. Although he made significant contributions to the symphonic repertoire, the theatre was his true passion. He aspired to create ‘The Great American Opera’: a genre situated between opera and popular theatre, combining the richness of European musical traditions with the vitality of American music, both classical and popular. The best-known example of this ambition is undoubtedly the 1957 musical West Side Story. Yet Bernstein came closest to realising this ‘new form’ in his comic operetta Candide, composed during the same period.
Based on Voltaire’s satirical novella of 1759, Candide follows the adventures of a kind-hearted and somewhat naïve young man who travels the world, becoming entangled in a succession of improbable situations. Its witty and exuberant score embraces virtually every genre in the Western musical tradition, ranging from Bach-style chorales and bel canto arias to dance forms such as the waltz, gavotte and polka.
...to the Sacred World of Chichester Psalms
In Chichester Psalms, Bernstein reconciles the vibrant spirit of Broadway with the sacred sphere, incorporating the rhythmic energy of his musicals into a choral work of profound spiritual resonance. He composed the piece in 1965 for the Southern Cathedrals Festival, held at Chichester Cathedral in Sussex.
Although originally conceived for boy soprano, choir and orchestra, Bernstein soon reduced the orchestration to organ, percussion and harp. He also stipulated that the boy soprano could be replaced by a countertenor, but never by a female singer. In his view, the liturgical character of the texts could only be fully conveyed through a male voice.
Bernstein’s Jewish heritage is clearly reflected throughout the work – not least in the use of the original Hebrew texts and the symbolic prominence of the number seven. Yet his broader aim was to emphasise the shared spiritual foundations of Judaism and Christianity. To that end, he employed his characteristically direct and luminous musical language to underscore the optimistic message of the finale: "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity."
Sounds from a new world
Gershwin is considered one of the most popular American composers. His most important merit: breaking down boundaries between musical genres. Gershwin grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a place where composers of various origins worked alongside each other, exchanged ideas and where various past and present cultural expressions mingled. As a youngster, he practised the piano for hours and attended as many performances of his favourite composers and pianists as possible. During his composition classes with Charles Hambitzer, the emphasis was mainly on the music of Debussy, Ravel and Schönberg, but his subsequent teacher, Edward Kilenyi, pushed him in the direction of popular music. This would earn him more public success. The latter came in 1919 when the singer Al Jolson recorded the joyful number ‘Swanee’ by the young songwriter. It was immediately Gershwin’s greatest hit. This was followed by classics such as ‘The Man I Love’ and ‘I Got Rhythm’, set to texts of his equally successful brother Ira.
But Gershwin was not satisfied with the success of his Broadway career. His fascination with the music of modern European composers such as Schönberg and Stravinsky impelled him to strive for a synthesis of the two worlds. In 1924, at the request of the jazz band leader Paul Whiteman, he composed his first orchestral work, Rhapsody in Blue (dubbed by the press as an ‘Experiment in Modern Music’), which received great acclaim from the celebrities of the European classical music scene. The success resulted shortly thereafter in a new commission, this time from Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Philharmonic. For this new composition, Gershwin drew inspiration from his recent stay in the French capital. He recorded his experiences in the form of a symphonic poem and once he had returned to the United States, he completed these sketches and titled the whole set An American in Paris. The work received its première that same year in Carnegie Hall.
Although Gershwin indicated that he did not wish to present any explicit scenes, the listener can perfectly imagine a typical Parisian scene: the bustle of night life, the music halls, a romantic walk along the Seine and the busy traffic — including actual car horns. About the latter, the musicologist Mark Clague discovered in 2016 that orchestras had for years been playing the wrong car horns. In the score, Gershwin labelled the horns with the letters a, b, c and d, but he did not mean the names of the notes here; he had entirely different notes in mind, namely, Ab, Bb, high D and low A. Critics saw the work as a hype that would soon blow over: “To conceive of a symphonic audience listening to it with any degree of pleasure or patience twenty years from now, when whoopee is no longer even a word, is another matter.” But they were wrong, as the work has been a popular work on the orchestral repertoire for almost a century.
texts by Aurélie Walschaert
