Word: bernsteins
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...YORK PHILHARMONIC YOUNG PEOPLE'S CONCERT (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* "Jazz in the Concert Hall," a study of modern symphonic composition incorporating jazz. Leonard Bernstein conducts...
...windup Leonard Bernstein? Whatever it was, a machine conducted the New York Philharmonic last week in a performance of John Cage's Atlas Elipticalis with Winter Music (Electronic Version). And considering what it was conducting, it probably did every bit as well as any human conductor could...
...Second Symphony, the audience was suddenly jolted by the whapping of wood blocks and the toneless horn-blowing of Yannis Xenakis' Pithoprakta. The Greek composer's work was so radical that this first U.S. performance sounded something like skeletons dancing in a wind tunnel. The audience found Bernstein's comments condescending. "A lot of mathematical formulas which I cannot follow," he said of the composition...
...later program, Stefan Wolpe's First Symphony was equally iconoclastic and prefaced by an even airier speech. Wolpe had written it in 1956, had never been able to get an orchestra to tackle what Bernstein called this "unperform-able work." Finally, after Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg-a mathematician as well as a conductor-agreed to take the podium, it went into rehearsal. It was still too much for the Philharmonic, which attempted only the first two movements (Not Too Slow and Charged). The symphony rapidly disintegrated into fragments of non-melody and non-rhythm. Long passages sounded like a busy...
Worse, his metaphysics overwhelms his music-the orchestra does little more than italicize the words of the speaker, and the emotional flow of the music follows the text almost sheepishly. The despair he portrays is only the despair of the prideful; drama is merely melodrama. Bernstein is a man of both cheek and genius; and in this case, the composer in him has been no more than the advocate of the showman, the charmer, the chap in the chukka boots shouting down from the balcony...