This production, conducted by the composer himself, presents a live-action cast performing on an animated set. Inspired by jazz and American musical comedy, the score is a path-breaking fusion of lyric art with popular entertainment. Factory...

An abiding ambition of Leonard Bernstein as composer was to write the Great American Opera. Indeed his own recordings of West Side Story and Candide in the last decade of his life, with their rosters of high-caliber singers, were intended in part...