The Unfettered Critic – August 2018

This August 25th marks the 100th anniversary of illustrious composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein’s birth.
And this column in the august August Jacksonville Review marks our 100th contribution as your ever-faithful Unfettered Critics. As CE3K’s Roy Neary said to his bewildered family: “This means something.”

Or not. Maybe it’s just mashed potatoes.

We often struggle with “what-the-heck-can-we-write” that will elicit at least a flicker of interest among you, dear readers. This time, the juxtaposition of those two “100s” led us into serious brain freeze.

What to do. . . what to do.

For a while, we contemplated adding those integers and compiling a dissertation on the significance of the number 200. But that would only make the problem twice as large. Next we considered skipping our column for the month—until we recalled that Lenny (Bernstein, remember) wrote the music behind “When you’re a jet, you’re a jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dyin’ day.” The same, we fear, applies to our dedicated unfetteredness. Quitting isn’t an option.

Then it came to us: make the entire column about Maestro Bernstein and leave us out of it. Therefore, we suggest that you ignore the above two hundred and seven words and start reading. . .

. . . here:

He was born in Massachusetts in 1918, and raised in New York City. When he was ten, a relative got divorced and needed a place (Guess where!) to store her piano. It was love at first sight. Lenny studied music in Boston, Philadelphia, and at Tanglewood. At the age of 25, he received an unlikely offer: assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic. On November 14, 1943, the orchestra’s guest conductor fell ill, and hours later, without a rehearsal, the youthful assistant was ordered to take the stage. His performance inspired ecstatic applause, an article on the New York Times’ front page and, thanks to the concert’s radio broadcast, national acclaim.

Not bad for an upstart kid. And it was only a beginning. Soon he collaborated with choreographer Jerome Robbins on a ballet, Fancy Free—which inspired them to develop what would become the long-running, smash Broadway musical, On the Town, featuring a helluva song: “New York, New York”.

At the same time, he was teaching, exploiting the new medium of television. He analyzed “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony” on the show Omnibus. And he hosted fifty-three wonderful Young People’s Concerts on CBS TV from 1958 to 1972, inspiring renewed interest in classical music from the American public.

During that time, he also composed the score to the Academy Award-winning Marlon Brando starrer On the Waterfront, which earned him an Oscar nomination. Oddly, it’s the only movie score he wrote—reportedly because he didn’t like that he had no control over the final product. He had no such qualms about Broadway, however, and wrote the Tony Award-winning comic operetta Candide along with Lillian Hellman.

We could go on—chamber music, choral arrangements, piano scores, symphonies—Lenny was pretty unfettered himself. Of course, our favorite Bernstein musical creation is West Side Story. Think of the songs: “Maria.” “America.” “Somewhere.” “I Feel Pretty.” “Tonight.” Yes, Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics, but, wow, those melodies. They’re a part of our collective consciousness, heard regularly on such varied productions as The Muppets, Glee, and The Simpsons, and recorded by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Dave Brubeck.

And this is where you come in. On August 10, Maestro Teddy Abrams will conduct two Bernstein compositions with Jacksonville’s own Britt Orchestra: “Candide: Overture,” and “Serenade (after Plato’s ‘Symposium’).” 7:30 p.m. See you there!