Roger Englander, producer of Young People’s concerts, dies
Roger Englander, the Emmy Award-winning producer and director of the acclaimed Young People’s Concerts, which featured the magnetic Leonard Bernstein leading the New York Philharmonic, died Feb. 8 at a hospital in Newport, Rhode Island. Hewas94.
The cause appeared to be pneumonia, said Michael Dupré, his companion and only survivor.
Englander was a staff director at CBS in 1958 when he and Bernstein began collaborating on the Young People’s Concerts, embracing the mission to educate children about the joys of music. Englander had years earlier helped stage operas by Gian Carlo Menotti.
“Lenny totally trusted Roger,” said Pulitzer Prizewinning composer John Corigliano, who was an assistant to Englander for the Young People’s Concerts. “If he weren’t comfortable with the director, it would have been impossible. But he didn’t have to worry.”
He added, “Lenny adored him.”
The concerts, initially mounted at Carnegie Hall and later at Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, have become a classic of educational programming and a powerful presence in the lives of many musicians, and musically minded people, even today.
Bernstein was their undisputed star. He wrote his own scripts; talked to guest musicians like pianist Andre Watts; played the piano to illustrate his commentary; and led the Philharmonic in classical, folk, jazz and pop music.
But he left the TV production to Englander, who regarded the scores selected by Bernstein as his directing guide.
“The choice of pictures — wide views, close-ups, tracking shots, rapid-fire montages or slow, languorous dissolves from one shot to another — is determined by the music itself,” he wrote in an essay for “Leonard Bernstein: The Television Years,” a 1985 exhibition at the Museum of Broadcasting in New York (now the Paley Center for Media). “The orchestra score becomes the shooting script, and the music holds all the answers for the director’s task of translating sound into picture.”
Using shots from as many as eight cameras — two of them on the stage and one trained, from behind the orchestra, on the emotive Bernstein — Englander directed all 53 hourlong episodes of the concerts, which were staged and broadcast intermittently over the years through 1972.
A reviewer for The New York Times wrote in 1964 that Englander had “again demonstrated that although confined to the limits of the concert stage, he is extremely adept at mobile camerawork, which always keeps the viewer interested.”
His work on the concerts brought him an Emmy in 1965.
Roger Leslie Englander was born Nov. 23, 1926, in Cleveland. His father, William, owned a men’s clothing store, where his mother, Frieda (Osteryoung) Englander, also worked.
At Cleveland Heights High School, Roger studied piano, French horn and trumpet and achieved an early ambition — to be a conductor — by leading the school’s band and orchestra. He studied drama, composition and
theory at the University of Chicago and graduated in 1945.
He quickly became associated with opera. In 1946, he was the stage manager for the debut of Bernstein’s production of Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Massachusetts. He also worked briefly at the Chicago Opera Company for its conductor, Fausto Cleva.
Over the next few years, he staged several of Menotti’s operas, including two, “The Telephone” and “The Medium,” in 1948, on WPTZTV in Philadelphia, an NBC affiliate. He distilled his knowledge of opera into a book, “Opera: What’s All the Screaming About?” (1983).
Englander started at CBS in the early 1950s, working on news, sports and public affairs programs. He also directed episodes of the cultural program “Omnibus” about violinist Yehudi Menuhin, the Vienna Boys Choir and the French horn.
In 1957, he had an idea for a musical series for children and pitched it to a CBS executive, but the interview did not seem to go well. A few days later, he learned that the executive “had actually been interviewing me for a totally different music series that his boss, William S. Paley, had cooked up with Leonard Bernstein,” Englander wrote in his essay for the 1985 Bernstein exhibition, referring to the chairman of CBS.
The Young People’s Concerts debuted in January 1958 with a program called “What Does Music Mean?,” and the reviews were favorable. Without a commercial sponsor, though, Englander worried that the series would not last long.