Embracing It All, He Left Much to Admire

Leonard Bernstein died 10 years ago last month. He was 72, and he died because he smoked too much and refused to stop. As his critics were fond of asserting throughout his life, he did just about everything too much and refused to stop.

He was a galvanic life force as conductor, composer, conversationalist, enthusiast. His appetites for books, music, Scotch, religion, parties, politics and sex were legendary. His friends also tell of his legendary insomnia, and endless nights of philosophizing with him.

Although his health had been declining, the sleep he finally achieved that October evening in 1990 came as a shock. Bernstein’s personality was so large, his presence so looming, his talent so extraordinary, that it was impossible at the time to predict what his legacy would ultimately be. All one could do was mourn and wonder how much of his life force would survive him.

Ten years later, we still grapple with the Lenny factor in American musical life. In many ways, the Bernstein anniversary has been a disappointment--no new major books or reassessments have come along (none of the three standard Bernstein biographies is fully satisfactory). Last week, Lenny’s own New York Philharmonic used its Bernstein memorial concert as a tryout for the Russian conductor Mariss Jansons, a candidate in the orchestra’s difficult search for a new music director who is unlikely to be anyone youthful, American or Lenny-like.

But the New York Philharmonic has undertaken one ambitious Bernstein project that does help us get a better grasp of Bernstein in the flesh and what he represents in today’s musical climate. The orchestra has released a 10-CD set, “Bernstein Live at the New York Philharmonic,” of performances over a 30-year period taken from archival radio broadcasts (and, in one case, a bootleg taped in the theater by a fan). Bernstein made hundreds of recordings. From the time he became music director of the New York Philharmonic in the mid-’50s to the end of his life, he had carte blanche to record what he wanted and how (all his discs from the last 15 years were live performances).

The majority of them document vibrant, exciting, probing and often incomparable performances. Bernstein valued and exploited his fabled spontaneity, and microphones were hardly inhibitors--indeed, they seemed to egg him on. Still, his ego was immense, and it would be unreasonable to expect him, when performing for posterity, not to be influenced by that fact.

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Listening to the broadcasts captured on “Bernstein Live,” we eavesdrop on everyday concert life. The set is intended mainly to fill in gaps in his discography with pieces that Bernstein never commercially recorded (and many that he performed only once) and a few pieces that he did record but that are here documented on special occasions. The earliest entry is the historic world premiere of Ives’ Second Symphony in 1951, the most recent includes Copland’s “Dance Symphony” and Lukas Foss’ “Quintets for Orchestra” from a concert in January 1981.

The Ives broadcast, which the composer listened to on his kitchen radio in Connecticut, doesn’t have the depth of Bernstein’s later two recordings of the symphony, nor are all of its interpretation problems worked out (Ives thought the fast movements too slow, and they are), but Bernstein’s intuitive grasp of a then unfamiliar idiom is unerring, and the thrill of discovering great music that had been written 50 years earlier is palpable. The performance of Copland’s early, and neglected, symphony is, by far, the most smashing on record.

This is exactly what we expect. Bernstein was, after all, the first great American conductor and the first great conductor of American music. But what comes between Ives in ’51 and Copland in ’81 is often a revelation. While every single performance on the set is of uncommon interest, Bernstein is particularly impressive in the classics. A performance of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” Overture is spectacularly good. A full 1970 concert of scenes from Wagner’s “Twilight of the Gods,” with Eileen Farrell and Jess Thomas, contains some of the warmest, most colorful, most moving and most exuberant Wagner I have ever heard. A terrifically idiomatic reading of Benjamin Britten’s “Spring Symphony” and a compellingly fluid one of Bruckner’s Sixth are further pleasures of the set. Equally so is a riveting Beethoven Triple Concerto from 1959--with Bernstein as pianist, concertmaster John Corigliano and principal cellist Laszlo Varga--paced perilously fast.

Bernstein’s almost pathological need to feel a connection with (and inevitably kiss and hug) every person in the room helped make him an amazing accompanist. For some an irresistible attraction of the set will be the documentation of the interaction with great soloists with whom Bernstein never recorded--especially notable are a dynamic Schumann Cello Concerto with Jacqueline Du Pre, an eloquent Beethoven Third Piano Concerto with Wilhelm Kempff and an amusingly raucous Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto with Lazar Berman.

But versatility was the quality for which Bernstein was most famous. He has gone down in history as the great champion of American music, of new music and of breaking down the barriers between popular music and concert music. He has also gone down in history as a brilliant educator able to teach audiences new ways of listening. “Bernstein Live,” however, demonstrates that even Bernstein had his limits.

For the 1963-64 season, Bernstein hosted a six-week survey of the avant-garde, mixing the latest and farthest-out music he thought audiences should know about with standard repertory. The most controversial piece in that survey, John Cage’s “Atlas Eclipticalis,” along with Bernstein’s extensive comments to the audience, is included in the set.

In his introduction, Bernstein shamelessly belittles the music and composer and prefaces the performance with a ridiculous mass improvisation and a few bars of a 12-tone piece written by a computer. On the first three nights that “Atlas” was played, audience and orchestra were increasingly in rebellion. By the time of the fourth repeat of the program and the Sunday broadcast (which is heard on the CD), Bernstein had chastened the players; they behaved, but their hostility is still evident.

This survey and Bernstein’s grandstanding (the press had a field day) turned the American avant-garde off orchestras for many years, beginning a war between the New York Philharmonic and the experimental composers known as the New York School that is still being fought. The equivalent situation in the art world would be the Museum of Modern Art persistently rejecting Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg, the visual artists closely connected with and influenced by those composers.

Listening to Bernstein’s condescending talks and performances of avant-garde composers, as well as his overly noisy Varese (“Arcana”) or his brash Webern (Six Pieces for Orchestra) destroys any notion that Bernstein could be all things to all music. He believed in tonality as strongly as he did in God, and he turned nasty when his beliefs were challenged. He has been superseded by Michael Tilson Thomas, who now introduces audiences to such music far more persuasively than Bernstein could.

But love or hate what Bernstein does with this piece or that, it is almost impossible not to listen to this set in utter fascination for hour after hour. Bernstein still holds our attention, and I suspect he always will. And thanks to quite listenable sound and and two lavishly illustrated booklets (with extensive and wonderfully opinionated annotations), Bernstein lives.

* “Bernstein Live” is available, for $195, at select Tower Records stores, by phone at (800) 557-8268 or online at https://www.newyorkphilharmonic.org