The second of Leonard Bernstein's three symphonies, The Age of Anxiety (1949), was planned as a musical depiction of WH Auden's lengthy poem of the same name. Artistically, that's a tall order. The modes of poetic and musical discourse can be aligned to superb effect in a vocal or choral setting, but transferring ideas from a concrete medium to an abstract one is fraught with difficulty. One could listen to Bernstein's piece long and hard without ever coming close to guessing what it is supposed to be about.
That would not matter if the score could sustain interest, but the ideas throughout its 35 minutes are thin and forgettable. Some pleasant jazz riffs, and an emotional splurge of an ending that Bernstein admitted was more Hollywood than Mahler, make meagre highlights. The result, essentially a fragmented symphonic poem with a full-scale piano obbligato (well played by Nicolas Hodges, though in places he needed to swing more), feels like a fairly average film score in search of a film.
One of Bernstein's innumerable proteges, Marin Alsop has been more loyal than most in attempting to keep alive the more dubious products of one of 20th-century music's most glamorous figures. But even her devotion was insufficient to suggest that the flame burns brightly here.
She had better luck with Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, which works on its own terms, whatever pro- or anti-Soviet subtexts it supposedly encompasses, though her delivery needed more momentum and vehemence. Ives's The Unanswered Question, the oldest yet most modern piece on the programme, would have worked better had the off-stage strings been positioned to maintain a more tangible sonic presence.
