Leonard Bernstein’s 10 big podium gifs

Daniel F. says:

The blogkeeper seems to suggest by this post that LB was something like the Elvis of classical music. Dumbing LB down has been tried. It doesn’t work. He is both more and less than this sort of thing. An over-rated re-composer of Mahler and Shostakovich, a great, modest conductor of Haydn and his American contemporaries, Copland, Diamond, Shapero. An uneven composer–we’ll all be singing the songs from “West Side Story” as long as the planet does its rounds but not humming the meretricious “Mass” or the and the pompous Kaddish Symphony—and an unheralded pianist–the best you’ll ever hear in Gershwin’s Rhapsody and the Ravel G Major and, at the Norton Lectures, in Schoenberg, whom he played passionately (as he should be played).

Stephen says:

Had he not abused his body he might have been still alive, though he might have been a less interesting musician.