28 / 116
“The fundamental, life-
changing experience
of Bernstein’s ‘Young
People’s Concerts’ has
informed everything
I’ve done.”
-MARIN ALSOP
Alsop continued working and learning alongside Bernstein after her fellowships
at Tanglewood in 1988 and 1989 (above), but he’d already begun guiding her
life and career as early as the mid-1960s, when she attended one of his “Young
People’s Concerts” with the New York Philharmonic (below).
“He was not only a great conductor and a great compos-
er,” Alsop says. “He was also a great thinker. He was a great
humanist. He was a great agitator. He was a great TV star. How
do you try to capture that, not just the one dimension that
people know about Bernstein, but the broad legacy that he left
and how he transformed not just classical music but certainly
musical theater and education in many ways? I think he trans-
formed our idea of what the maestro as a citizen of the world
could be.”
Ravinia’s varied centennial programs this summer will high-
light different facets of those accomplishments. The opening
July 12 concert with Alsop leading the CSO, for example, shows
off Bernstein as both composer and conductor. It re-creates a
program from his final tour with the New York Philharmon-
ic, one that brought him to Ravinia in 1986. It will feature
Bernstein’s Overture to
Candide
and his
Serenade (after Plato’s
Symposium)
, a 1954 five-movement concerto for solo violin,
strings, and percussion with Joshua Bell as soloist, as well as
Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, the “Path
é
tique.” The July 23
program with Alsop and the CSO, by contrast
,
features the mu-
sic of his mentors and friends—Copland’s
Appalachian Spring
,
Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue
with jazz pianist Makoto Ozone,
and Stravinsky’s
The Rite of Spring
. “There is none of Lenny’s
music on that, right? Yet there’s no program more exemplary of
Lenny than that particular program,” Kauffman says.
Bernstein was also a pioneering educator whose televised
“Young People’s Concerts” in 1958–72 with the New York
Philharmonic set the standard for how classical music could be
explained to children (and adults) in a down-to-earth, com-
pelling manner. Alsop went to one of those concerts with her
father when she was 9 years old. She doesn’t remember what
repertoire she heard, but she recalls Bernstein turning around
and talking to the audience, making it seem easy to enjoy
classical music without all the strictures and fussiness too often
associated with it. She knew immediately that she wanted to be
a conductor. “That fundamental, life-changing experience for
me has informed everything I’ve done,” she says. “And the idea
of talking to people about classical music always seemed very
natural to me, and I’m sure that’s in large part thanks to being
exposed to Bernstein at such an early age.”
On July
28, Bernstein’s daughter Jamie—a writer, broad-
caster, and lifelong advocate of her father’s music, for whom
he imagined scripting his “Young People’s Concerts”—will
narrate a new generation of the program for Ravinia’s Kids
WALTER SCOTT/BSO (PREVIOUS PAGE AND TOP); DON HUNSTEIN (YOUNG PEOPLE’S CONCERT)
RAVINIA MAGAZINE | JULY 9 – JULY 22, 2018
26