Word: bernsteins
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...Leonard Bernstein is a man of so many parts that he finds it hard to find time for the part that is serious composer. He had not composed a work since the Kaddish symphony two years ago. But he could not say no when the Bishop of Chichester asked him to create a piece for the 1965 Tri-Choir Festival to be held at the ancient cathedral in Sussex, England. Last week a capacity audience of the excited and curious packed into New York's Philharmonic Hall to hear the Chichester Psalms...
...like its predecessor, is a choral work in Hebrew and is scored for a prodigious cavalcade of instruments including a glockenspiel, xylophone, a pair of cymbals, a suspended cymbal, tambourine, triangle, rasps, whip, wood block, three temple blocks, timpani, snare drum, bass drum and three bongo drums. Conductor-Composer Bernstein made the most of them; he went through his entire ballet routine on the podium and had the Philharmonic Orchestra playing like gods, and the Camerata Singers sounding like angels...
...joyful noise unto the Lord"). Psalm 23 ("The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want") was a pastoral solo sung by a boy alto till the chorus interrupted with "Why do the nations rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?" The third and finest section of Bernstein's 18½-minute work interweaves Psalm 131 through a simple canon to a pianissimo "Amen...
...applauding audience of Bernstein fans loved it. The critics were less enthusiastic, but respectful. "Extremely direct and simple-and very beautiful," said the New York Times. But to some sophisticated ears, it was only a skillfully composed travesty of religious sentimentality that plucked the heart strings but left the spirit untouched. Explained Bernstein, "I feel that it is my simplest and most direct composition. It's very difficult to write tonal music in this age of dodecaphonics, and I'm stuck with being a tonal composer...
...island, on a point of land called West Chop, some of the homes have been in the same family for generations. Such luminaries as Katharine Cornell, James Cagney, Thomas Hart Benton, Leonard Bernstein and Lillian Hellman have long summered among the island's rolling moors and scrub pine. Small cottages rent for from $100 to $150 for each person per week during the season, and better furnished or better located houses run considerably higher. One lucky schoolteacher who pays $135 a month for the house during the winter months sublets it for $1,000 a month during the summer...