“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,’ ” writes William J. Kole in a Thursday (9/21) Associated Press story. “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 composer-conductor, 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, [says], ‘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.’ … Bernstein never forgot his Massachusetts roots. He spent four decades guest-conducting the Boston Symphony and wrote his ‘Divertimento’ for the orchestra’s own centennial in 1980.”
Posted September 22, 2017
Photo: An early photo of Leonard Bernstein. Photo courtesy of the Leonard Bernstein Office.
