Word: bernsteins
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...madmen! Madmen all!" But the dividing line between madness and love is unclear, and they come, above all, because they love the musical form of poetry, the amalgam of arts, that is opera. By joining words and music, sight and sound, opera enables the audience, as Music Master Leonard Bernstein has put it, to "experience conflicting passions, contrasting moods and separate events. And because only the gods have ever been able to perceive more than one thing at a time, we are, for this short period, raised to the level of the gods...
...playboy or an obsessive lecher. What gives him nobility and heroism, what defines him as not simply a lecher but a rebel against God, is Mozart's music. "An F-sharp doesn't have to be considered in the mind; it scores a direct hit," Leonard Bernstein points out. "Think of King Lear in an opera. He'd be raging as no Lear could ever rage in a spoken play: in a great bass voice, with a frantic high G-flat, a howling chorus offstage, and 90 players helping...
SCHUMANN: FOUR SYMPHONIES (Columbia). In recording Schumann's symphonies as they were originally orchestrated, Leonard Bernstein has compiled a catalogue of the composer's many moods. He deals decisively with the complicated polyphonic structure that Schumann imposed upon his gentle, lyric thoughts and puts the composer-whimsical, sad, angry-across without blurring overlaps of Teutonic bravura...
...Barber and Paul Hindemith test Stern's talents in contrasting ways. For Barber, the violin must gently caress the lush phrases and clearly sing the profusion of simple melodies. With Hindemith, the instrument becomes one of dark conflict. Stern is superbly in control of both, as is Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic...
...tallest point, the two pieces represent the rounded rump and upright torso of a semireclining figure. Typically Moore-ish, she abstractly lounges in the reflecting pool, mingling the domestic grace of a nude in her bath with the powerful, primitive presence of a goddess disturbed from sleep by Leonard Bernstein. Manhattan's mightiest piece of modern sculpture was wrestled into place pretty much the way marbles were muscled into place in Michelangelo's day. Grunting workmen wedged the huge metallic shapes onto rollers, eased them down wood beams, hoisted them upright with block and tackle. Meanwhile, the foreman...