© Susech Batah, Berlin (DG)
Leonard Bernstein
Lenny Show-off, visionary, playboy, pedagogue, clown, genius. A century ago America spawned Leonard Bernstein, the most indefinable musician to ever hold a conductor’s baton. Adored, condemned, respected, worshipped – whatever he was, ‘Lenny’ proved the most important American classical musician of the 20th century, introducing hundreds of thousands to the symphonies of Beethoven and Mahler whilst using his own works to charge through the perceived boundaries that separated art music and popular music. Bernstein could have made it as a pianist, conductor or composer, and yet he chose all three – marrying these disciplines with his own sense of passion, fun and originality. By all accounts, every performance he conducted was an occasion, no matter how far-flung his sometimes eccentric interpretations. His stage manner prompted many a written description, one notably from his biographer Humphrey Burton, who tells of the maestro taking an umpteenth curtain call in front of the New York Philharmonic and offering a suave kiss to his young conducting assistant, Marin Alsop. Alsop has gone on to become a leading conductor in America and Europe. She joins us this season for a look at Bernstein’s concert works. Despite the raging popularity of his masterpiece West Side Story, he longed for recognition for the uplifting, surging profundity of his symphonies and delicate exuberance of his choral works. The perception was that Bernstein was simply too talented; he couldn’t be that good at conducting Mahler, creating musicals and writing symphonies, could he? Well yes, he could. And we have the compositional legacy to prove the case for Bernstein the composer. These apparent contradictions troubled Bernstein himself too – not only the conflicting responsibilities of the composer and the conductor, but also his apparent bisexuality and the social demands of his incomparable personality. But through the years Bernstein retained his energy, openness and creative genius as long as music was there to fuel and inspire him. As for Marin Alsop, ‘I didn’t mind telling Lenny he was the greatest in the world’, she recalled in a recent interview, ‘because he was.’
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