Today is the 97th Anniuversary of the Birth of Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990). Leonard Bernstein was an American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the USA to receive worldwide acclaim. According to music critic Donal Henahan, he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."
His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras, and from his music for West Side Story, Peter Pan,[3] Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town, On The Waterfront, his Mass, and a range of other compositions, including three symphonies and many shorter chamber and solo works.
Bernstein was the first conductor to give numerous television
lectures on classical music, starting in 1954 and continuing until his
death. He was a skilled pianist, often conducting piano concertos from the keyboard.
As a composer he wrote in many styles encompassing symphonic and
orchestral music, ballet, film and theater music, choral works, opera,
chamber music and pieces for the piano. Many of his works are regularly
performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous
popular and commercial success of West Side Story.
I could think of no better way to describe Bernstein than in the words of his brother Burton who wrote the following tribute shortly after Leonard's death in 1990. It is permanently posted at the Leonard Bernstein website:
"My Brother Lenny
by Burton Bernstein
My brother Lenny, who was always larger than life, turned out to be smaller than death. Amazingly – just like that! – he is no more. It seems impossible.
Those of us who were closest to him, who knew him best and longest, who loved him most, we – such lucky ones we are! – we somehow assumed that he would go on forever, like time itself, that he was somehow immortal, not just perishable matter like the rest of us.
There would, we felt, always be our Lenny doing what he did so passionately, so brilliantly, so charmingly, so originally, so lovingly, and, yes sometimes so excessively – always so full of life and so much larger than life.
All the world knows what he did:
Teaching people – his favorite occupation, really. Descended from rabbis, he was a rabbi at heart, a master teacher. Just listening to Lenny was an education. (I know this better than because I was taught by Lenny from just about my first day on this earth.) There was nothing he'd rather do than stimulate new thoughts for, especially, young minds.
Making history. He was the living precedent for American music – the first American to be taken seriously on the concert stage. I think it can be said that he made it possible for any talented American kid to follow in his footsteps.
Experimenting with the new, even though he was a hopeless traditionalist. He welcomed the avant-garde, but he cherished the pristine, lovely tune – the simple song.
Revivifying the old – which I believe was his greatest gift as a conductor. How often have we heard, as if for the first time, an echt Lenny rendition of, say, Tchaikovsky's Fifth or Brahms's First, and marveled at all the nuances we had missed over the years? How often have we seen and listened to him draw, through sheer love and musicianly example, unforgettable performances from orchestra – performances the musicians would later admit that they never knew they had in them? His very last concert – conducting Beethoven's Seventh at Tanglewood – was only one case in point.
Preaching love and peace. Naively, he wanted the whole world to love itself into one big happy family, and he took it as a personal affront when the world refused to comply. He maintained unflinching optimism and religious trust in the ultimate improvability of man, despite all the hard evidence to the contrary. Lenny was in love with love.
Helping young talent and his less celebrated, less lucky contemporaries, some of whom responded to his kindnesses with rank envy and disloyalty, which typically, Lenny was quick to ignore or forgive.
And for those of us who were his nearest and dearest, there will always be the special memories:
His love of games, and particularly, his infuriating success in trouncing us at anagrams – the game of games, at least to him. And then there were tennis and squash and skiing and swimming and sailing and touch football – the last featuring the annual Thanksgiving classic, called the Nose Bowl [note spelling correction: not "Nose Ball"], in the backyard of his house in Fairfield, Connecticut.
His grand generosity with his worldly goods and with his loving spirit. No one in Lenny's company was ever left wanting. And a compliment from Lenny was like no other compliment; it was total, absolute, and thoroughly thrilling for the fortunate recipient. (Of course, he could also be occasionally tactless. Shirley once said that if you happened to have a pimple on the end of your nose, Lenny would lose no time in pointing it out to you – and perhaps the entire world. He was an enfant terrible to the end.)
His happiness at others' happiness. He really did share in others' joy, and also in their grief.
His "obliging at the pianoforte," as he would put it – at Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, Passover, whatever, whenever, great occasion or not.
His humor, which so often went with the "obliging." A great joke was a great performance for Lenny. He could laugh – and make us laugh – in a dozen languages, including our very own private family language called Rybernian. Language: To Lenny, words were mysterious, astonishing creatures – to be scrutinized and analyzed like cells under a microscope. Words were the equals of musical notes for him, and he loved them with equal fervor.
Just as long as people care a damn about something finer in life than power and money and their imagined superiority over others there will always be Lenny around to educate, entertain, edify, move and inspire – to change us all in some wonderful, subtle way"
In celebration of this momentous occasion I have posted down below is Howard Goodall's Twentieth Century Greats profile of Bernstein that presents a great overview of his life and legacy. Then the year before his death, Bernstein conducted a Christmas day concert celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall in the former East Berlin with an international Superstar Cast. The cast included the Symphonieorchester des Bayerisches Rundfunks and members of Staatskapelle Dresden, Orchestra of the Leningrad Kirov Theatre, London Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic and Orchestre de Paris. The video of that historic celebration, one of Bernstein's finest performances as a Conductor follows the documentary footage. The celebration continues on my tumblr with a marvelous live performance from the Konzerthaus in Vienna. Leonard Bernstein conducts the venerable Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in Piano Concerti Numbers 1 & 2 by Johannes Brahms. The Piano Soloist is Krystian Zimerman.
Finally for today, I have gathered a comely collection of Random Hotness which you will find posted down below. Also on my tumblr, you will find your Hottie of the Day! who is all 'Buff in Blue!'. Thanks for the visit, be sure to tune in tomorrow for this week's edition of New Adventures in Good Music when we travel to Paris to discover something about this week's Featured Composer. Until next time as always, Enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment