<h1 class="title-main">Reviewed: Dinner with Lenny - the Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein by Jonathan Cott </h1>
<span class="submitted"> <span class="link_col">By <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/writers/suzy_klein" title="View author posts.">Suzy Klein</a> <span class="published_date">Published 09 April 2013 8:57<br><br>
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<img src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/fullnode_image/articles_2013/3436979.jpg" alt="Leonard Bernstein in 1975. Photograph: Getty Images" title="Leonard Bernstein in 1975. Photograph: Getty Images" class="imagecache imagecache-fullnode_image imagecache-default imagecache-fullnode_image_default" height="348" width="510"> </div>
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Leonard Bernstein in 1975. Photograph: Getty Images </div>
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<p align="center"><strong>Dinner with Lenny: the Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein</strong><br>
Jonathan Cott<br>
<em>Oxford University Press, 208pp, £16.99</em></p>
<p>Leonard Bernstein was possibly conservative America’s least likely
classical music poster boy. The son of Ukrainian Jews, he was
promiscuous, a heavy drinker and a chainsmoker. Lenny, as he was always
known, burst on to the music scene in the 1940s seemingly ready-made – a
formidable composer and conductor. His timing was perfect, for he was
to become an influential voice in a period of conflict and calamity,
busily convincing the world of music’s powers of salvation. He was there
at the fall of the Berlin Wall to conduct Beethoven; there in the
concert halls premiering his astounding orchestral music; there on
Broadway composing modern classics such as <em>West Side Story</em>. Bernstein was a man unbounded by the stuffy traditions of the orchestra, possessed of a keen mind and a proselytiser’s zeal.</p>
<p>Bernstein’s orchestral debut in 1943 has gone down in musical
history. The young conductor stood in at the last moment for the
indisposed Bruno Walter. After Bernstein strode on to the platform to
conduct the New York Philharmonic, one of the world’s orchestral
behemoths, something magical happened. Long-toothed players in their
fifties and sixties, who saw him as a “snotnose”, stood to applaud their
conductor at the end of the concert – a gig that, Bernstein later
confessed, he had no memory of, from the opening notes until he heard
the audience going wild at the close.</p>
<p>Immediately, Bernstein became a force of nature, dominating the
American music scene and giving televised lectures that electrified
audiences in the English-speaking world and beyond, screened in more
than 40 countries. No one had ever talked so passionately about
orchestral music. Thanks to Bernstein, a generation of kids raised on
pop and rock began to talk about and love the work of Stravinsky and
Beethoven.</p>
<p>Jonathan Cott’s new book captures a wonderfully atmospheric dinner à
deux that took place in 1989, a year before Lenny’s death. By then, the
old warhorse, in his seventies, had retired but he still burned with
fire in his belly and a desire to argue and expound.</p>
<p>Cott, a contributing editor at <em>Rolling Stone</em> magazine and
author of more than 16 books, mostly on the 20th century’s great
musicians, was given the once-over by the maestro and approved. The
12-hour conversation that followed at Bernstein’s home in Fairfield,
Connecticut, is a revelation. Through predinner drinks, a meal served by
Bernstein’s assistant and manyvodkas drunk late into the night, Lenny
talks with astonishing directness about music, politics, life after
death, education and not a little about sex.</p>
<p>He smokes and sings as he plays a selection of his beloved records,
getting hot under the collar while talking of the sudden close of
Sibelius’s <em>First Symphony</em>: “Two Chords. That’s it . . . as if
to say, ‘Fuck you, if you don’t like it, go home’ . . . Very 20th
century.” In Beethoven’s musical surprises and shocks, he hears: “A left
to the jaw, a right hook to the body!” On Wagner, he is
characteristically pithy: he was “always in a psychotic frenzy . . . a
madman, a megalomaniac.”</p>
<p>The erotic power of art was always what drove Bernstein and one of
the reasons many criticised his highly emotional and theatrical
performances. Bernstein’s hyper-personal style was regarded in some
quarters as unseemly and in bad taste, not least by the arch-modernist
conductor and composer Pierre Boulez, who unsurprisingly comes under
fire here. He is dismissed by Bernstein as “trivial and not to be
discussed”. Boulez, he declares, “is just intellectualising”.</p>
<p>For Lenny, art was personal and music and sex were always utterly
inseparable. He tells Cott of the love affair that was ignited when he
first played the keyboard, saying: “I was ten when I touched those piano
keys . . . That was before I could get a hard-on.” Mahler is
“impregnating” his audience; Michael Jackson was such an exciting
musician that Bernstein felt he must kiss him fully on the lips; writing
music is “as if the composer were being made love to by a divine
essence”.</p>
<p>It was the same life force that sent Bernstein off to Studio 54,
dancing to Donna Summer, bare-chested under his black biker jacket,
immediately after performing Beethoven’s <em>Ninth Symphony</em> with the New York Philharmonic.</p>
<p>What Cott has achieved, through this final interview, is to make all
of this come vividly to life – to make Lenny speak and sing again. It’s
not always a book for the general reader and there is, unapologetically,
a lot of learned talk about music here. But Bernstein wanted to reach
out to people by celebrating his subject and he expected his audience to
rise up and meet him there, together scaling the heights of music and
culture.</p>
<p>It’s been said that if you remember an evening with Lenny, you
weren’t really there. The genius of Cott’s book is not only to remember
but to recall with pinpoint accuracy and sympathy the flame of Leonard
Bernstein that burned so brightly and so true.</p>
<p><em>Suzy Klein is a presenter on BBC Radio 3</em></p>
</div><a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/04/reviewed-dinner-lenny-last-long-interview-leonard-bernstein-jonathan-cott">http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/04/reviewed-dinner-lenny-last-long-interview-leonard-bernstein-jonathan-cott</a><br>
<br clear="all"><div><div>carlos palombini<br></div><a href="http://www.researcherid.com/rid/F-7345-2011" target="_blank">ufmg.academia.edu/CarlosPalombini</a><br><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div></div>
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