When Bright Sheng went to the Tanglewood Summer Music Festival as a young composer, he didn't think his Peking Duck would lead to a meeting with Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein left impressed by the music and thrilled by Sheng's cooking. Those minutes in the kitchen made Sheng "Tanglewood famous," he says, and was the beginning of a long working relationship with Bernstein.
After fighting in the Austrian army during the first World War, composer and violinist Fritz Kreisler moved to the US, where, initially, he didn't receive a warm welcome. Kreisler missed his home in Vienna, and he wrote that sense of longing into music. On Monday's Performance Today, we'll hear his String Quartet in A minor, from a live performance recorded at the Music@Menlo festival.
Leonard Bernstein's love of word play and competitive drive was notorious. Whether it was anagrams or mental jotto, Bernstein's former assistant Charlie Harmon says there were few who could beat him. And if you did, his daughter Jamie Bernstein said, you might wish you hadn't.
Leonard Bernstein took a keen interest in helping many of his fellow musicians. He launched dozens of careers, including that of pianist Andre Watts. Less than a week after Watts debuted on stage with Bernstein and the NY Philharmonic, they made what became a best-selling recording. Hear it on this weekend's Performance Today.
Composer Thierry Escaich uses traditional melodies as a starting point, then moves them to unexpected territory. On Friday's Performance Today, hear the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra perform "Psalmos, Concerto for Orchestra" by Thierry Escaich.
Conductor, composer, pianist Michael Tilson Thomas says few people realize how rooted Leonard Bernstein was in Jewish Theater. Thomas says that shared interest created an immediate bond between them.
Ignacy Jan Paderewski was a dashing, virtuoso pianist around the turn of the 20th century. In 1919, he was the Prime Minister of Poland (his signature is on the Treaty of Versailles). On Thursday's Performance Today, hear Paderewski's Piano Concerto No. 1 from a concert in his hometown of Warsaw, Poland.
In 1982, Charlie Harmon was hired to be Leonard Bernstein's assistant. The first meeting did not go exactly smoothly, but for four years, Harmon had a first row seat to the thrilling, jet set, creative and exhausting career and life of Bernstein. Harmon has written a new book about their work together called On the Road and Off the Record with Leonard Bernstein.
In 1989, just a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leonard Bernstein performed a concert in East Germany for the world to see. They played Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, based on Schiller's Ode to Joy poem, but Bernstein changed one important word. Journalist Stephanie Griffith was there, reporting for the Los Angeles Times.
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