Performer: Kim Criswell

Under the baton of John Wilson, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra played Bernstein’s music with jazzy verve. The fine team of vocal soloists was lead by Kim Criswell.

The message of Voltaire’s novel Candide, ou l’Optimisme is that rationality and reason, rather than custom, faith or authoritative orders should determine all human activity, and although this quintessence of the Age of Enlightenment sounds self-evident nowadays, a visit to the newspaper kiosk shows us otherwise: a lot of luridly-titled guidebooks and magazines try to talk us into believing that a

First published in 1759, Voltaire’s Candide was re-imagined for the concert stage by Leonard Bernstein in 1956. An operetta whose aim was to mock the belief that everything—literally, everything—is for the best, Candide was an ideal medium through which to critique the excesses of McCarthyism and the complacency of the Eisenhower administration in 1950’s US politics.