Remembering Elmer Bernstein
Composer would have been 100 years old next year
He was a wunderkind: the youngest music director ever to lead the New York Philharmonic and the genius behind the score to “West Side Story.”
The late Leonard Bernstein would have turned 100 next year, and on Friday, the Boston Symphony Orchestra kicks off a new season dedicated to the Massachusetts-born composerconductor, one of America’s most famous maestros.
Carnegie Hall gets into the act, too, launching its 2017-18 season on Oct. 4 with a Bernstein program by the Philadelphia Orchestra and music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin. And the New York Philharmonic will perform Bernstein’s complete symphonic works in a centennial remembrance that starts Oct. 25.
Andris Nelsons, the Boston Symphony’s music director, calls Bernstein an “iconic figure” who influenced generations - including his own.
“Growing up in Latvia in the 1980s and ‘90s, Leonard Bernstein always loomed large in the hearts and minds of all of us who aspired to a life in music, including mine,” Nelsons told The Associated Press in an email.
“It was Bernstein’s exuberance, passion and all-encompassing love of music that convinced all who encountered him that music was essential, affirming and necessary for a full life, in which beauty and inspiration ignite the very best of the human spirit,” said Nelsons, now in his fourth season leading the BSO.
Things to know about Bernstein and the centennial celebrations:
THE MAN
Bernstein was born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in gritty Lawrence, Massachusetts, on Aug. 25, 1918. At age 10, the course of his life changed forever when an aunt gave the family an upright piano.
Bernstein’s father ran a beauty supply business, but the young musician wanted none of that. He studied at Harvard, the Curtis Institute and the Boston Symphony’s summer retreat at Tanglewood in the Berkshires. Famed composers Aaron Copland and Serge Koussevitzky recognized his talents and mentored him.
He was just 25 when he got his big break, filling in for the New York Philharmonic last-minute to conduct a nationally broadcast concert. He became the Philharmonic’s first U.S.-born conductor in 1958 and won a slew of Grammys, including a lifetime achievement award in 1985. Bernstein died five years later at 72 in New York City.
THE MAESTRO
Nelsons calls Bernstein a “trailblazer,” and that’s arguably his greatest legacy: winning global acclaim as an American at a time when European conductors dominated the international music scene.
Bernstein’s 1943 ballet about a trio of sailors granted a day’s shore leave in New York became the runaway Broadway smash hit “On The Town,” later made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly.