Sunday, December 23, 2018
Did someone say Bernstein conducting?
Here he is more of a semi-conductor, kind of a III-V deal goin' on there (shout-out to CL), and this video cracks me up. He cues the woodwinds with his eyebrows, scowls at the mop-topped beardy-weirdy to get him to saw harder on the cello, and all in all it is very amusing. Of course there is more to the story than meets the eye, but he does put on a kind of a funny show.
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5 comments:
No mere band theory for Lenny -- he was the real deal.
I forget whether he was p- or n-type. I guess it depended on whether Wolfe was watching.
While sometimes the work was boron, at other times it was a GaAs.
I had a music prof who played cello w/ the Philly Philharmonic. Taught us a lot. Sometimes he would just play his cello, stop and lecture, and then go back to the cello.
Von Karajan would never pull such a stunt! But then VK took everything too seriously, himself included.
That was quite the stunt, and you are correct, ricpic, von Karajan would never have done that. Did you ever notice how much Bernstein and von Karajan resemble each other? I have, but that's a story for another day.
The back story on that clip is that Lenny had just conducted Haydn's 88th with the Wieners and playing the final movement again was his encore piece. So they had just gone through it, they knew what he wanted, tempi, dynamics, cues and all, and this was just a bit of showboating by one of the biggest showboats of all time.
I am of two minds when it comes to Bernstein - he was undoubtedly brilliant, but he his life was pretty much a dumpster fire in many other regards. Such is the way of some geniuses, at least in my experience.
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