I have just emerged from the film Maestro, about Leonard Bernstein. I don’t attempt to critique the movie here. Suffice to say that it contains as much poetic licence as Lenny would surely have approved. This is rather a personal snapshot of what he meant to just one of the aspiring conductors out there who all claim him as a friend.
The first meeting with Bernstein
It was in the middle of Brahms‘s glorious Seventh Variation that I first noticed him. I turned towards the cellos and basses, just where they have the countermelody. He was standing in the wings, watching me conducting, conspicuous in a silver lamé bomber jacket. Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn were all but forgotten in the split second I recognised Bernstein. But Brahms waits for no one, and I still had the elusive Eighth Variation plus the finale to navigate.
It was August 1985, and I was conducting a concert with the Tanglewood Music Centre Orchestra at the Boston Symphony’s summer home in the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts. I came off stage into the embrace of Leonard Bernstein. He proceeded to tell me how much he could have taught me, and started to demonstrate. Meanwhile, the audience were applauding, and I wanted some of it, besides which I had to acknowledge the principal flute, the horns and the violas, all of whom played a big role in the Brahms. One curtain call was all he allowed me.
Lenny had come to town and he expected one’s attention. By ‘one’s’, I mean ‘everyone’s’. I soon saw that there was an enormous entourage accompanying him, including at least two film crews. He held court, and performed for them, but quickly got back to the subject in hand- that Seventh Variation. ‘Llewellyn,’ (he’d already got my surname down, pronouncing the double ‘L’ in perfect Welsh) ‘you should beat it like this’. He proceeded to sing and beat time, to everyone’s delight, and further applause.
This, I was going to learn, was typical of the dichotomy that was Leonard Bernstein. The personal, private teacher, who needed the oxygen of public adoration to function.
As for my beloved 7th Variation, I actually disagreed with him! His beat pattern, I thought, was too busy and clunky. Plus, it slowed down the gently lilting siciliano, which is Brahms’ most heavenly variation.
I had the sense to hold my tongue.
Bernstein in rehearsal
The next day I was due to conduct Brahms’ 4th Symphony at the seminar for Bernstein.
A group of the usual 200 or so aspiring young conductors, plus the film crews, and sundry paparazzi were gathered for his arrival, which he accomplished in some style. At the wheel of his gold Mercedes convertible, number plate MAESTRO 1, he casually cruised up the drive, with an almost royal wave. It was the nearest thing to movie stardom behaviour that I would ever witness. I thought I knew Brahms’s Fourth, having played it as a cellist many times, and studied it thoroughly. I could probably have written most of the score from memory. Little did I know.
At the wheel of his gold Mercedes convertible, number plate MAESTRO 1, he casually cruised up the drive, with an almost royal wave
We spent the next hour and a half, never getting beyond the opening 16 bars of the first movement (see photos, from that session). With the music as his source Bernstein digressed. His flight of fancy took us to 17th-century French dance, (he demonstrated various moves), Shakespeare’s Henry V (Llewellyn is a peripheral character), Vienna (he’d just returned from the Vienna Philharmonic, whom he apparently had to teach how to play Waltzes), Yin (the descending opening third interval in the Brahms) and Yang (the answering rising sixth). It was totally brilliant, captivating, absorbing, inspiring and entertaining. I had just been in a room with Leonard Bernstein and 200 other people, cameras rolling and clicking, and I felt that he was only there for me. How to reconcile the showman with just the extraordinary human was going to be a struggle for me.
He met my wife Charlotte. ‘Do you belong to him?’, he asked. ‘No, he belongs to me,’ she mischievously answered, and he laughed uproariously.
Bernstein’s friendship with Copland
The conducting seminar took place at Seranak, the former home of Serge Koussevitsky, the legendary Boston Symphony Music Director, and mentor of the young Leonard Bernstein. Another founding member of Tanglewood, and dear friend and colleague of Bernstein was the composer Aaron Copland. And so it was that the reception committee greeted the arrival of MAESTRO 1 one day containing the 85-year-old Copland in the passenger seat. As one of the few conducting Fellows I was introduced by Bernstein to Copland. When it comes to name-dropping, this a great line I have used often and shamelessly.
Copland was by then suffering from early dementia, and did not recognise or recall many of his old friends. Despite this, he knew Lenny, and his musical memory was impressively sharp. A weekend of Copland’s music was being prepared to celebrate his 85th birthday year and it was wonderful to see him come alive in rehearsals. His Third Symphony (which I had conducted earlier in the year at the Royal College of Music, stepping in for a sick Norman Del Mar) was conducted by Bernstein. I was encouraged to observe that all the same pitfalls for a conductor and orchestra existed on the other side of the Atlantic too. It was an emotional occasion though. Bernstein led Copland through it all with a care and attention which were utterly sincere and touching.
The humour and all-embracing genius of Bernstein
Back in the UK I went to a London Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by him with a mutual friend of Bernstein’s, Alan Fluck. Lenny greeted us with “Alan, have you still got your redundant “L”? And Grant, you’ve got four of the bloody things,’ in his best queen’s English accent. Incorrigible but so clever.
He had commented back in the US on my baton case, and because his was on its last legs asked where he could get one. I told him it was nothing special, and that I could easily pick one up for him when he was next in town.
Shortly after he died I was contacted by his PA Charlie, who said that the family wondered if I would like the baton case which I had bought for Lenny. I used it for over 25 years, until it too fell apart on a BBC National Orchestra of Wales tour to Patagonia. I don’t use a baton anymore – it seems increasingly superfluous to the act of music-making.
Certainly in the hands of Leonard Bernstein it was an unnecessary tool, as he conducted with his whole persona. That ‘persona’ eclipsed everything, and to appreciate the man required total commitment, and dedication to the Bernstein cause. It transcended any petty preoccupation with crotchets and quavers, British sensibilities, decorum, refinement and good taste, and required oodles of artistic licence backed up by surely one of the most brilliant minds ever to have played a C major scale. In the words of Peter Ustinov ‘In the custom’s shed of opinion, he declared everything he possessed every time, down to the contraband, the whole sparkling with shafts of a rare intelligence’.
The baton was an unnnecessary tool. He conducted with a persona which eclipsed everything
I have known many Maestri over the years at Tanglewood, and as Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony. Ozawa, Previn, Masur, Tilson Thomas, Dutoit, Rattle, Gardiner, Norrington, Eschenbach, Abbado, Haitink, Leinsdorf and many others, but none come close to matching the all-embracing genius that was Leonard Bernstein.