In addition to the song cycle which gives it its name, the album includes the Suite from Bernstein's opera A Quiet Place and the Symphonic Dances from his musical West Side Story.

[1] The first version is scored for four singers and piano duet, and was first performed in May 1988 in New York City by Joyce Castle, Louise Edeiken, John Brandstetter, Mordechai Kaston, Leonard Bernstein and Michael Tilson Thomas.

[1] The second version is scored for two singers and piano duet, and was first performed on April 22, 1989, in the Recanati Hall of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art by Amalia Ishak, Raphael Frieder, Irit Rub-Levy and Ariel Cohen.

This version was recorded by Judy Kaye, William Sharp, Michael Barrett and Steven Blier and released on CD in 1990 by Koch International Classics (catalogue number 37000-2).

[1] In 2018, SFS Media released a new recording of Coughlin's version, performed by Isabel Leonard, Ryan McKinny and the San Francisco Symphony under Tilson Thomas's direction.

Among the many playful allusions in Arias and Barcarolles, he wrote, was one to Johannes Brahms's Liebeslieder Walzer, and it was this particular witticism that was key to understanding the essence of Bernstein's song cycle.

Bruce Coughlin's version "takes the piece somewhere else, it distracts from, pulls focus from, the ingenuity and intrigue of the word-play, it over-paints the musical allusions, shifts the emphasis from implicit to explicit."

On a good night, Maurice Murphy would deliver the mariachi trumpet break in "Mambo" in a way that would "fry the air around him", but even he had been unable to raise the temperature in the Henry Wood Hall to where it needed to be.

Arias and Barcarolles and the Suite from the poorly received A Quiet Place were among just a few works that emerged from Bernstein's old age, he wrote, a time when the composer's thoughts were governed by an "obsessive preoccupation with the trials and tribulations of family life".

The stirring Suite from A Quiet Place was deservedly more popular than its source had ever been, and Michael Tilson Thomas, "a perpetual Wunderkind in the Bernstein tradition", was the ideal man to conduct it.

[8] Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) Arias and Barcarolles (1988), orchestrated by Bruce Coughlin Suite from A Quiet Place (1983), arranged by Sid Ramin (1919–2019) and Michael Tilson Thomas with the assistance of Michael Barrett Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (1957), orchestrated by Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal (1911–1994) under the supervision of Leonard Bernstein In 1996, Deutsche Grammophon released the album on CD (catalogue number 439 926-2) with a 48-page insert booklet providing texts in the original English and Yiddish and in French and German translations.

The booklet also included photographs of von Stade, Hampson, Tilson Thomas and Bernstein and notes by Michael Barrett and Steven Blier in English, French, German and Italian.