Word: bernsteins
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This, to hear Conductor Leonard Bernstein tell it, is what might be happening at a climactic moment during Richard Strauss's Don Quixote. Bernstein bawled this analysis from the podium at one of his current New York Philharmonic Young People's Concerts. His point: music does not need verbal meanings assigned to it, and Don Quixote could as well be about Superman as about the "silly old man" on a "skinny, bony old horse...
...faced, jovial schoolmaster: hard work and solid teaching in the fundamentals of composition and literature. Marson scoffed at curve-grading (the clod-coddling marking system that is based on the class average), insisted that his boys measure up to definite levels. One bright boy who measured up: Composer Leonard Bernstein, who still talks of Marson's lectures on English poetry. Says a Boston Latin colleague of Marson: "Phil never pretended education was fun or that there was any substitute for hard work. He was the ideal secondary-school teacher...
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...
...Such noted U.S. composers as Aaron Copland (The Heiress) and Leonard Bernstein (On the Waterfront) have written distinguished film music. Some composers have used films as the inspiration for music that has become part of the concert repertory, e.g., Sergei Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky and Lieutenant Kije, Virgil Thomson's Louisiana Story. *The others: Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre, Louis Durey...