Leonard Bernstein
Daniel Felsenfeld on WNYC Tonight
I wanted to alert readers that yours truly will be the guest on WNYC’s program EVENING MUSIC on Wednesday, October 1, as part of their Bernstein proceedings and I’ll be talking about Mass. The piece is a hot New York topic because of an upcoming performance of the piece at Carnegie Hall but, as I’ve [...]
Final thoughts on Leonard Bernstein: The Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
With sadness, I come to the end of my posts about the Bernstein Conducts Bernstein: Original Jacket Collection. I could spend months on these records, in grand exegesis of the personal meaning of all of these works, the spectacular quality of the composition, or the puzzle that was Leonard Bernstein. I could spend [...]
Serenade from Leonard Bernstein: The Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
I grew up in Orange County, specifically in a small “town” called Placentia. I use “town” in scare quotes because it tends to conjure up Agee-like images of general stores and nosy neighbors, but that was not the case. More a suburb that rolled easily and unnoticeably into the next, so it wasn’t [...]
More on Leonard Bernstein: The Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
An excerpt of Harold C. Schonberg’s bitter 1971 The New York Times review of Bernstein’s Mass:
“For love and the brotherhood of man will not solve our problems. Better housing, jobs for everybody, and adherence to the Bill of Rights will do a lot more. Anyway, the ones who talk loudest about universal love are [...]
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, from The Original Jacket Collection
By Daniel Felsenfeld
The election season has made it clear: we live in the most complex of times, divided times. I continue to think of a piece of music that I love—love—a piece that tries, fails, tries again, fails again, and doggedly keeps on trying regardless to advance a dramatic retelling of a particular kind of [...]