Candide

‘Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’: such is the teaching of the learned Dr. Pangloss. Life does indeed seem sweet at the castle of Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh, until the day a kiss shared with the beautiful Cunégonde gets Candide kicked out of paradise. As he roams the world, encountering war and disaster, the young man takes stock of the irrelevance of Pangloss’s precepts and understands that it is better to make one’s garden grow than to put one’s trust in grand philosophical systems.

In the mid-1950s, Bernstein saw Voltaire’s tale as the ideal material to roast post-war American conformism and create a true ‘American operetta’, combining the spirit of Offenbach, the energy of Broadway and virtuoso orchestral writing. Rich with a great variety of forms and full of nods to European masters, Candide became a classic across the pond and the 1989 version with a narrator, now firmly established as the standard score, will be conducted by Guillaume Tourniaire during two concert performances.