Candide (1991)

"Even Bernstein rarely had so great a triumph in London as at this concert performance of Candide at the Barbican. It was in December 1989, only months before he died, during his last visit to London. Yet his electricity and intensity were at the fullest peak; in every way it was a great and moving event, which seemed at last to provide the solution to a problem which had long beset Bernstein, settling the most effective text for this Voltaire-based piece, so full of musical treasure but so unwieldy. In this concert performance the numbers are supplemented not only by spoken introductions to each act by Bernstein himself, talking from the rostrum, but by the witty narration devised by John Wells for linking the numbers, making wry sense of Voltaire's improbable story. Adolph Green, veteran lyric-writer himself, as Dr Pangloss, delivers most of them, with a few unscripted asides and extra contributions from Bernstein, aided at times by Kurt Ollmann, otherwise underemployed as Maximilian." (Gramophone)