Word: bernstein
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Friends in the U.S. read that as a cry for help. Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia asked Senator Edward Kennedy to intercede...
...pale Russian winter's landscape, his blue eyes shone mischievously. He turned toward his colleagues and, with a sturdy slash of his baton, launched into a high-speed, raucous overture that seemed to roil the Potomac. It was strictly show-biz razzmatazz, a pastiche stitched together by Leonard Bernstein from his 1976 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The show had not fared well on Broadway, and the music culled from it might have passed unremarked?except that the enraptured man on the podium was the renowned cellist and magnificent maestro Mstislav Rostropovich, the N.S.O.'s new permanent conductor, Washington's grandest...
What was a nice, "serious" musician doing in a piece like this? It was an all-Bernstein program, and the composer had dedicated the overture to Rostropovich by way of acknowledging his arrival in Washington. The music was called Slava!, which is not only the Russian word for glory but Rostropovich's nickname, and it was a good way for the conductor to show Washington that he is as gifted with jazz as he is with Tchaikovsky. Rostropovich caught the spirit easily, bending his body into the music, shafting his cues with a vigorous baton, sculpting the shapes of sound...
Slava had been glorying for two weeks. For his season's opening the week before, he featured Rudolf Serkin in a velvety performance of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, creating a sensitive orchestral accompaniment to Serkin's ethereal tonalities. For the Bernstein concert, Slava took up his own instrument, while Lenny conducted his Three Meditations from "Mass" for Violoncello and Orchestra, an episodic piece that gave listeners a chance to hear Slava produce his exquisite cello sound, to watch his left hand flick across the finger board, his right arm streak like a bowing jet. Both programs were enlivened...
...conducting his life." His performances of the Schubert Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano and the Schumann Cello Concerto are typical. The phrasing and pastels of dynamics in the Schubert expose a bold lyricism that would have astonished?but probably pleased?the composer. As for the Schumann, Leonard Bernstein, who recorded the piece with Rostropovich, confesses that he would just as soon not do it again in quite the same fashion. "Slava takes enormous freedoms," says Bernstein. "He does things that one would think would simply destroy the form of the piece. But he makes it work because of the tremendous...