DREAMS OF BERNSTEIN
by Jason Loewith on 1/22/2008 03:54:00 PM 

Week two of rehearsals for The American Dream Songbook begin tonight, and I can't get Leonard Bernstein's delirious music out of my head... it's a wonderful problem. Our first week of rehearsal has been dedicated to Act One of our evening, which is Bernstein's rarely-heard 1952 jazz-opera, Trouble in Tahiti.



I had a rather stunted musical upbringing, thanks to years under the stern fingers of a classical piano teacher who wouldn't let me learn Billy Joel's "Piano Man." Never able to impress my friends (they weren't into hearing Bartok at parties), I indulged my love of classical music through my godfather, who gave me my first classical music tape (Mozart's Piano Concerto #23, still my very favorite).

My godparents' home was full of delicious cultural artifacts that I still remember vividly, thirty-five years later. Beautiful mortars and pestles (my godfather was a pharmacist), eye-charts with Hebrew letters... and on the wall, the most precious thing a Jewish, artsy kids from the 'burbs could imagine: a framed concert program signed by Leonard Bernstein... with the conductor's baton he used that night, mounted atop it.

The baton's handle was cork, and I could imagine it wicking up Bernstein's sweat as he vigorously led his orchestra through musical peaks and valleys, notes washing over the audience, seeping, flooding, dripping, dangling, rushing... I never saw Bernstein conduct in person, but I watched the New York Phil on TV just to see him leap and prance and weep his way through a concert.

When I now watch Karen Doerr sing "A Quiet Place" in rehearsal, conducted so beautifully by our music director Jeremy Ramey, I feel the same emotional swell that I did back when I was five... and I think of Bernstein's slender, powerful baton.

Labels: American Dream

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