Bernstein

Everybody who’s anybody knows the story, or so legions of Lenny’s fans would tell you. Almost 65 years ago, the 25-year-old Leonard Bernstein, a whirlwind of youthful abandon with his mop of wild, leonine hair, stepped in at the last minute to conduct the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall when the scheduled conductor, Bruno Walter, suddenly fell ill. And it was Lenny’s dazzling performance, broadcast across the country, that propelled him into the national spotlight.

Decades later, to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was Lenny—by then the face of music for an entire generation—who led a televised performance of Beethoven’s Ninth with an orchestra of musicians from both eastern and western Europe in an unparalleled symbol of unity and unification. Instead of “joy,” the words of the famous finale on this occasion extolled “freedom.”

In 2008–2009, Carnegie Hall, in partnership with the New York Philharmonic, honors the illustrious career of this multitalented artist with Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds. The festival will celebrate the breadth of Bernstein’s contributions to American and international musical culture, with over 30 events in seven different venues—from concerts and recitals to lectures and films.

The first event in the Bernstein festival is nothing less than the Carnegie Hall’s Opening Night Gala: an all-star concert on September 24 featuring Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony, Yo-Yo Ma, Dawn Upshaw, and Thomas Hampson. Later in the season, on November 14, Lenny’s famous 1943 debut will be commemorated by the New York Philharmonic in a special concert at Carnegie Hall, where his stardom began.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Marin Alsop, a former Bernstein protégée, joins in the festivities with two special performances of Bernstein’s monumental Mass, which Bernstein wrote to open the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, in 1971. At the premiere, some audience members, according to a report in the New York Times, called Mass “the most beautiful thing that they had ever heard.”

“I think it’s a terrific piece,” says Alsop of Mass. “The themes really are universal. It asks: What does religion mean? What does faith mean? Why are we so divided, and how can we come together?”

Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony will present the huge multimedia work first at Carnegie Hall on October 24 and again the next day at the United Palace Theater, when they will be joined by over 800 middle and high school students. Those students will have studied Bernstein’s Mass in detail in an education program of The Weill Music Institute, a program that also explores themes of faith, doubt, tolerance, and the renewal of tradition—in short, the essence of Lenny.

Major funding for Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds has been provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, American Express, and the National Endowment for the Arts.