Word: bernstein
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Musicians, like other artists, occasionally regard themselves as pioneers whose wagon train to the mountains of truth and beauty is encircled by whooping savages : the critics. Last week New York Philharmonic Wagon Master Leonard Bernstein, whose hide has been punctured by as many arrows as any, leveled his Winchester at a particular pesky redskin. Asked what he thought of music critics by Reporter Martin Agronsky on NBC-TV's Look Here show, Bernstein replied: "I have come to take them not very seriously any more. When you do get mad at a critic is when he is a self...
Then, without mentioning his name. Bernstein singed the war bonnet of New York Herald Tribune Critic Paul Henry Lang, 56, professor of musicology at Columbia University, who had scolded Maria Meneghini Callas and Tenor Daniele Barioni for singing flat in their first-act duet in La Traviata (TIME, Feb. 17). The pitch was dropping so fast at one point, Critic Lang had written, that it seemed as if the singers were about to land in the conductor's lap. Bernstein's complaint about this display of "great authority and chilling wit": Barioni was indeed...
...current boom started when Decca taped the palpitating score by Elmer Bernstein (no kin to Leonard) for The Man With the Golden Arm found itself with an unexpected hit on its hands. Decca is now high on the charts with the soundtrack music of Around the World in 80 Days by Victor Young. Other companies have rushed into vinyl with the sound tracks of such uncertain musical bets as Mogambo, The Pride and the Passion, Hot Rod Rumble. By and large, present-day studio composers seem a trifle more sophisticated than the practitioners of "Micky Mouse" music...
...Leonard Bernstein had not learned a new piano work in five years, but last week was special; he was making his first appearance with the New York Philharmonic since his appointment as its new permanent conductor and musical director. Lennie spent the weekend whipping Dmitry Shostakovich's new Concerto No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra into final shape for its U.S. premi...
...movement. The work was so far from the bite and sparkle of Shostakovich's first piano concerto (1933) that no one could decide whether the five-finger exercises with which it ended were an attempt at wit or merely a concession to Maxim's halting progress. But Bernstein piled through the piece just as if it all meant something, looking up from the keyboard occasionally to conduct his orchestra...