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“A splendid tribute to the diverse genius of Leonard Bernstein… All of this is beautifully captured by Naxos’s recording.” The Telegraph

“…Leonard Bernstein's 1954 Serenade… contains some of the composer's most polished and coherent music. And it's done full justice by the formidable technique and shapely phrasing of the Russian-American violinist Philippe Quint, with outstanding support from violinist-turned-conductor Marin Alsop and her ever-improving Bournemouth orchestra.” BBC Music Magazine, December 2005 *****

“This is even better than Marin Alsop's previous Bernstein collection… combining a more generous playing-time with top-notch sound, lively as well as spacious. …Alsop… has always sprung Bernstein's rhythms with a real feeling for the idiom while tending to eschew the element of rhetorical overkill familiar from his own performances. Here the element of caution translates into elegance.” Gramophone Magazine, December 2005

“The word 'chutzpah' might have been invented for Leonard Bernstein's Kaddish Symphony.
Not content with challenging the great deity in the sky, Bernstein also takes on the credo of 1960s 12-tone orthodoxies in his third symphony – a far greater sin in the eyes of some.
'Every son defies his father, fights him…only to return to him closer and more secure than before,' Bernstein wrote as he explained how Jewish theology informed his score. And as his speaker rages against God, down in the orchestra there's a furious debate about what Bernstein perceived as the crisis in modern music.
The raw material of Bernstein's score is a dialectical clash between paternal tonality and 'errant' 12-tone music, although it's hard to imagine a more hummable tone-row. This centrifugal tension powers the symphony on, and Gerard Schwarz conveys the unfolding drama with strategic clarity. Ironically in the circumstances, Bernstein's own pull-no-punches 1977 DG recording with the Israel PO must hang heavy over any conductor approaching the piece. One giant tick in Schwarz's plus-column is Willard White, a less mannered speaker than Bernstein's Michael Wager. The orchestra and voices, too, sound as if they're taking pleasure in Bernstein's highly inventive scoring, running the spectrum of his jazzy big-band swagger and post-Darmstadt atonal webs with ease.
In comparison to Kaddish's angst, ChichesterPsalms is a cathartic work that, to paraphrase, requires little more than reading the lines without tripping over the lopsided time signatures.
Schwarz energises the Technicolor opening movement, although choral vulnerabilities detract from the work's conclusion. None the less, a disc Bernstein fans will relish.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“The raw material of Bernstein's score is a dialectical clash between paternal tonality and 'errant' 12-tone music, although if anyone's written a more hummable tone-row I've yet to hear it. One giant tick in Schwarz's plus-column is Willard White, a less mannered speaker than Bernstein's Michael Wager. The orchestra and voices, too, sound as if they're taking pleasure in Bernstein's highly inventive scoring, running the spectrum of his jazzy big-band swagger and post-Darmstadt atonal webs with ease.” Gramophone Magazine, May 2006

“[the Barber is] delivered with real panache by Schwarz and his orchestra...[Diamond's] brass writing is very assured, whether it’s big and brazen or disarmingly quiet. Indeed, there’s plenty of the latter, with Schwarz coaxing nicely nuanced playing from his band. A most satisfying conclusion to an otherwise uneven programme.” MusicWeb International, August 2012

“It’s good to have a new Naxos recording with Marin Alsop conducting the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in sensitive, exciting, and impressively lucid performances of three Bernstein works… …The Bournemouth Symphony, in technically adept, bracing performances, plays like a top-notch orchestra.” New York Times

“Everything in the score clearly stands out under Alsop's eagle eyes and ears, with syncopated rhythms and canonic passages securely aligned and the Bournemouth brass at their assertive best” Classics Today

“Some years ago Andrew Litton presided over a memorable all-Bernstein concert for Virgin Classics that showed that the Bournemouth orchestra could swing with the best of them; now it's the turn of new principal conductor Marin Alsop to put them through their paces.
Very sassily they strut, too, in the exuberant outer numbers of On the Town. It's a similar tale in the symphonic suite from On the Waterfront.
Alsop displays a special sympathy for this score's intimate undertow, investing softer music with a tingling atmosphere and lyrical poetry that consistently ignite the imagination, and moulding the love theme with a warmth and vulnerability that all but match the composer's NYPO version. Not that there's any lack of red-blooded drama or brazen spectacle, even though Mike Clements's otherwise excitingly dynamic sound-frame exposes some slight thinness of violin tone.
The account of the Chichester Psalms is polished, communicative and beautifully sprung, attaining eloquent heights in the soothing setting of Psalm 23 for boy treble and mixed choir, as well as the strings' impassioned plea that launches the last movement.
A conspicuous success. The playing-time is comparatively stingy, but, given the superior quality of the music-making and the low Naxos price-tag, not many should complain.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“Alsop and her Bournemouth band capture [On the Waterfront] as surely and atmospherically as they do the glitzy exuberance of On the Town...it reeks of adrenaline, and brutal oppression...It may be cheap, it may have been recorded this side of the Atlantic, but it never shows. This really is bargain Bernstein; his pupil's done him proud.” Andrew McGregor, bbc.co.uk, 9th October 2003

“…is a virtual triumph from beginning to end, and the only recording for me worthy of sitting next to the composer's own. …Alsop's tight-knit, symphonic pacing delineates the structure of the work without diluting its exuberant eclecticism or softening its hard road towards spiritual reawakening: the final Communion is among the most moving passages ever recorded. She is no slouch, too, when it comes to that elusive Bernstein groove; if you aren't dancing around the room during the Gloria in Excelsis, you haven't got a soul to save, my friend!” BBC Music Magazine, September 2009 *****

“…Alsop's Jubilant Sykes is the best of all possible Celebrants. Mass follows the Celebrant to the darkest place a proselytiser for faith can travel - from sneaking doubt towards a full-scale breakdown as, in Bernstein's climactic scene, he trashes the altar and sends the sacraments scattering. Sykes brings an intensity that chills. Just as the Celebrant flips comes the most remarkable passage of all - a funky 10-bar refrain of "Dona nobis pacem"... Alsop ensure this passage pushes the Celebrant over the top... the orchestral playing too, here and throughout, is lusty and unafraid to let go.” Gramophone Magazine, September 2009

“Bernstein's relationship with God is dangerous, probing, transformational.
There are those, of course, who proffer that Bernstein thought he was God, that's why he could stand in defiance against Him. But Mass reveals a man thirsting for faith but petrified of blind acceptance. Bernstein's religion was muscular and intellectualised, and the experience of Mass expands, rather than contracts, the further you travel towards the essence of its cosmology.
Alsop's Jubilant Sykes is the best of all possible Celebrants. There can be few roles in contemporary music theatre that demand so many sides of a performer. He must disentangle music of gnarly complexity; he needs an operatic sensibility, but must also swing like a hipster jazzer and declaim with authentic rockist swank. Sykes's voice shakes with James Brown's ecstasy, snarls with Janis Joplin-like indigence and projects through the labyrinth of Bernstein's tricky melodic contours like any trained voice would.
He was born to play this part.
Although she doesn't drive things quite as far as Bernstein, Alsop is pacey, creating a dramatic slipstream that is powered relentlessly onwards by the awkward discontinuities and jagged narrative.
Even if the atheist cannot quite love the God-fearing D major affirmation of the final scene, it doesn't matter. The journey, the process of discovery, counts for more.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“this gloriously expansive performance [of Let Our Garden Grow] moved me to tears, as much for the sheer brilliance of these young players and their director as for the memory of that all-round musical genius, Leonard Bernstein. Wind-band playing of the highest order; what a joyful noise!” MusicWeb International, 19th April 2013

“William Terwilliger's coloratura violin in 'Glitter and be gay', coming complete with bungee-jumping glissandos and gravity-don't-bother-me note leaps, is infused with the spirit of Bernstein's original vocal lines but sounds effortlessly virtuosic...And so the Bernstein formula for composition was born - borrow what you like, it's the resonance and inventiveness of the mix that counts.” Gramophone Magazine, April 2011