Word: bernstein
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...anyone seeking an excursion into early "classical jazz", this disc may merit a side trip. Chailly's direction is faultless but for a few absences of "oomph." However, concentrated study may best be confined to those who felt the influences most at home--Copland, Gould and, later, Bernstein make excellent examples...
Books: An exhaustive biography of Leonard Bernstein...
...sophisticated evaluation of Bernstein's music is also missing from Leonard Bernstein. Burton usually cannot find his own words to describe a piece, so most of the critical burden is borne by contemporary reviewers whom the author quotes without qualification. To describe Bernstein's neurotic, distasteful 1983 opera A Quiet Place, Burton relies on an early statement of the composer's: "If I can write one real moving American opera that any American can understand (and one that is, notwithstanding, a serious musical work) I shall be a very happy man." Writes Burton: "It had taken him 35 years...
...credit, Burton faces up to Bernstein's manipulative and relentless sexual predations without sensationalizing them, as Joan Peyser did in her 1987 biography, Bernstein. But here too he withholds judgments: the spectacle of Bernstein and his daughter Jamie both falling in love nearly simultaneously with the German pianist Justus Frantz surely calls for amplification. The moving finger, though, having writ, moves on -- to the 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard...
...this is exactly the problem. A writer who can make Bernstein's sex life boring is capable of any enormity. Respectful to a fault, but devoid of any spice or sauce, Leonard Bernstein is the kind of passionless hagiography that Leonard Bernstein would have hated...