For some, Leonard Bernstein was the person who opened up the world of classical music for the first time. Others played in his orchestras. One man remembers hearing of Bernstein’s death as a 9-year-old. Composer, conductor and teacher, Bernstein touched the lives of millions of people around the world during his 50-year career, and now…
Larry and Toby Milstein, two rising young Jewish socialites, held a séance in Leonard Bernstein’s former apartment, attempting to summon the spirit of the deceased composer, according to The New York Times. The ghostly communication took place at The Dakota, the Central Park West building perhaps most famous for being the site of John Lennon’s…
The composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein may have been a genius, but he was, apparently, fickle with other people’s belongings. As The New York Times’s Michael Cooper reported, Bernstein borrowed a copy of Gustav Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde” — “The Song of the Earth,” a song cycle for tenor and alto or tenor…
You can see Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” as a Broadway musical, as a film, and now, as a stop-motion gif. Well, sort of. The New York Public Library (NYPL) just digitized over 1300 photographs of the original production of “West Side Story” in 1957. The photographs, taken by Martha Swope, Friedman Abeles, Florence Vandamm,…
Filing in to 59E59 Theaters for “Maestro”— Hershey Felder’s bravura impersonation of and tribute to Leonard Bernstein—ticketholders were greeted with a stage projection of archival TV footage showcasing a young handsome Leonard Bernstein in lecture mode. Felder—as Bernstein—in word and at the keyboard—launches this autobiographical-cum-musical recitative by recalling his father Samuel Bernstein’s antipathy to piano…
Getty Images In 1971, the first time Maurice Peress conducted Leonard Bernstein’s “MASS,” the monumental piece echoed the life and death of John F. Kennedy, the social upheaval of the 1960s, and the morass of Vietnam. Spectators today might see “MASS” in a very different light — as a tragic commentary on U.S. involvement in…
There’s always some nostalgia baked into a Broadway musical, that old-fashioned and always-dying art form that reached its apex in middle of the 20th century. It’s there in the subject matter, too: Even the freshest “Guys and Dolls” puts you in vintage New York; “Gypsy” is ever in the late days of vaudeville; and even…
● Alan Jay Lerner: A Lyricist’s Letters Edited by Dominic McHugh Oxford University Press, 336 Pages, $39.95 Sometimes the Yiddishkeit of a creative talent comes through only in private writings. Playwright and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner won immortality with the stage musicals “My Fair Lady,” “Camelot,” and “Gigi,” which are filled with British and French…
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