The New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) spring gala last night celebrated the life and career of Leonard Bernstein with song and reminiscence at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. Though the conductor, composer and educator died at 72 in 1990, a quarter-century later classical music and theater continue to feel his impact.
Host Jessye Norman set an elegant tone for "Remembering Lenny" with her introductions, but moments of seriousness and levity alternated through the evening. Among the friends of NYFOS packing the concert hall was Barbara Cook, the musical theater and cabaret legend who originated the role of Cunegonde in Bernstein's Candide in 1956. "People don't talk about how sexy he was," Cook said before singing "Some Other Time" from On the Town. "Even his conducting was sexy."
His music sure could be. My own introduction to Leonard Bernstein came through playing the French horn in a suite of music from Candide in junior high school wind ensemble, and it has always stuck with me even though I've never seen a production of the show. I suppose I must have seen or heard West Side Story too by the time I got to college, and that's where I had my closest encounter with the Bernstein phenomenon. By pure chance I and the composer's daughter Nina were "lab partners" in a college course I thought of as "astronomy for poets." I place "lab partners" in quotes because there isn't a lot of laboratory action in astronomy, so Nina and I didn't get to know each other at all well and I'm sure she doesn't remember me, but I'll never forget it.
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