Jamie Bernstein, one of Leonard's three children, has very graciously agreed to answer a few questions for us. Today we are very pleased to share this special interview with this very talented and busy woman.
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| Jamie Bernstein |
Growing up in a household that included not only her musical father, but also her pianist and actress mother Felicia Montealegre, it's no wonder that Jamie is now a narrator, writer and broadcast who works to share and teach the excitement of music with others.
Jamie travels the world as a concert narrator, appearing
everywhere from Beijing to Caracas to Vancouver. In addition to her own
scripted narrations, Jamie also performs standard concert narrations,
such as Walton’s “Facade,” Copland’s “A Lincoln Portrait” and her
father’s Symphony No. 3, “Kaddish.” She is a frequent speaker on musical
topics, including in-depth discussions of her father’s works.
In addition to "The Bernstein Beat,” a family concert
about her father modeled after his own groundbreaking Young People’s
Concerts, Jamie has written and narrated concerts about Mozart and
Aaron Copland, among others.
As a broadcaster, Jamie has produced and hosted
shows for radio stations in the United States and in Great Britain. She has hosted several seasons of
the New York Philharmonic’s live national radio broadcasts, and has
presented various series for New York’s classical station, 96.3 WQXR FM ,
including annual live broadcasts from Tanglewood.
And on top of all that, Jamie
also writes articles and poetry, which have appeared in such publications as
Symphony, DoubleTake, Town & Country and Gourmet.
Jamie is a devoted mom to her two children, Francisca and Evan.
She is an avid scrabble and tennis player, and makes an annual
pilgrimage to the Utah desert to recharge her spiritual battery.
And now, on to the interview!
You were quite young when West Side Story was first staged. Do you remember
anything about the premiere?
Nope! I was barely 5 years old. What I remember better is
when the film came out; by then I was about 10. I loved the movie so much, I
vowed I'd see it ten times! I thought that was such a wild aspiration -- but by
now I've probably seen it at least 50 times.
Although my brother and sister and
I loved the movie (along with just about the whole world), our dad wasn't all
that crazy about it. But he'd been too busy to work on it himself, so he didn't
grouse in public. He had delegated all the musical work in the film to the
arranger Johnny Green.
Out of all of your father’s work, what does West Side Story mean to you?
West Side Story was such an enormous presence in our lives that it
was almost like a fourth sibling.We've known it all our lives, everybody loves
it, and it's amazing how that music doesn't seem one bit dated.
Reading your website, it seems you most deeply admire your father for his gifts
as a teacher – something you have apparently inherited. What made him such an
amazing teacher?
I think my father didn't make a big distinction between
teaching and learning; for him, they were so connected as to be virtually the
same process. Teaching for him was just sharing what he was excited about, and
learning had no meaning until he could share it, and then he was teaching. It
was a circuit of energy that kept him going -- and that's what conducting was
for him too.
He and the orchestra were together exploring a work: learning,
teaching and sharing the process with each other -- and then together sharing
the fruits of that process with an audience, whose attention and delight
circled back around to the musicians through the conductor. A true electrical
circuit! They don't call him a "conductor" for nothing.
What do you think he would have made of modern technologies such as the live HD
broadcasts from Metropolitan Opera, YouTube and instant communications like
Twitter?
I'm really sorry my dad isn't around to participate in
these concert broadcasts. He started doing just that in his lifetime, but the
technology wasn't there yet to make it so immediate and widespread.
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