“Didn’t you like it?”

Leonard Bernstein and Mildred Spiegel attended the Boston Symphony Orchestra season in 1933.

They sat, she remembers, in the second balcony “under one of the male Greek nude statues.” One evening, during a standing ovation for the orchestra’s music director, Serge Koussevitzky, Lenny “just sat there” clapping very softly. “What’s the matter,” I asked, “didn’t you like it?” “Not like it? I love it! That’s the trouble. I’m just jealous of any man who can make music like that.”

H. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, London, Faber & Faber Ltd, 2017, p. 57.


Posted

in

by


Featured Content

Reich on the accessibility of his music
American composer Steve Reich on his compositional process: When I compose, I notice I’m the only one in the room. (laughs) I tend to be a somewhat self-critical person. I use my emotional faculties to judge whether I want to hear something again. Basically I have no one in mind except pleasing myself. And my […]
Growth by dreams
We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter’s evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them, nurse them through bad days till they bring them to […]
Liszt’s account of a performance by Chopin
Franz Liszt described one of Chopin’s concerts in the Gazette musicale, May 2 1841. Last Monday, at eight o’clock in the evening, M. Pleyel’s rooms were brilliantly lighted up; numerous carriages brought incessantly to the foot of a staircase covered with carpet and perfumed with flowers the most elegant women, the most fashionable young men, […]
Music and time
“There is also in this [nineteenth-century romantic] music an extraordinary sense of control over the passage of time; a moment will be held still as if suspended, and then released with a rush. Einstein has told us that time is relative, flexible and elastic; I have noticed these qualities whenever I have tried to play […]
The life of a pianist
My life involves endless hours of repetitive and frustrating practising, lonely hotel rooms, dodgy pianos, aggressively bitchy reviews, isolation, confusing airline reward programmes, physiotherapy, stretches of nervous boredom … punctuated by short moments of extreme pressure …perhaps most crushingly, the realisation that I will never, ever give the perfect recital. It can only ever, with […]
Sleeping Beauty Waltz (Tchaikovsky)
Title: Sleeping Beauty Waltz Composer: Pytor Il’ich Tchaikovsky Arranger: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Cello and piano Product medium: PDF score and part Sample:
Moving mountains
“The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” – Chinese proverb
Stravinsky and Charlie Parker
There is a story that Igor Stravinsky went to the New York jazz club Birdland one evening in 1951. Whispers went round that the great composer was in the house. When Charlie Parker came on with his quintet, he didn’t acknowledge Stravinsky in person, but seamlessly quoted The Firebird in his first number, the furiously […]
Dee-da-dee-da-dee-da-splat
“I also like to play the famous tunes because there’s nothing like inspiring a whole bunch of kids who are struggling to play these pieces on flute.  And then they see me ripping through them.  They all want to play Flight of the Bumblebee when they’re 11 years Old.  And it goes something like “dee-da-dee-da-dee-da-splat!” […]
Theme from The Office
The theme to the comedy series The Office is based on the 1967 song “Handbags and Gladrags” (written by Mike d’Abo). It was arranged by Big George in 2000.