Filmed in 1977, the documentary had to wait thirty-one years before being released in his native country. It shows the iconic American conductor rehearsing and performing at a Bernstein retrospective in Tel Aviv - equally amazingly, the very first retrospective given to his music.
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Watch an amazing performance of Bernstein's "Mambo" from "West Side Story" by Gustavo Dudamel with Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar de Venezuela:
• Gustavo Dudamel: Berns...
In Leonard Bernstein: Reflections, he discusses his Boston childhood, his musical growth at Harvard and the Curtis Institute, and the influence of great masters like Reiner, Mitropoulos, and Koussevitzky. He shares his feelings on the primacy of tonal music and speculates on the nature of the creative process.
From Carnegie Hall, the scene of his debut, to the living room of his home and his private studio overlooking New York's Central Park, Reflections explores the artist's varied and colorful career. Bernstein's eloquence and charm have marked his television appearances from the pioneering Omnibus programs of the 1950s, and the CBS Young People's Concerts, to the provocative Norton lectures delivered at Harvard in the 1970s, and are powerfully evident in this documentary.
Bernstein's genius was, notoriously, protean in its scope. Conductor, pianist, composer, teacher, author, media celebrity: he excelled in all fields, much to the chagrin of his detractors, who felt that he should focus on one thing only and do it right. Yet all his many activities interlocked and cross-fertilized each other: to remove any one of them would have impoverished the rest. Their common denominator is encapsulated in the film's opening sentence by his words "the urge to communicate - with as many people as possible." It's an axiom under which the manifold activities of this almost maniacally dynamic musician fall neatly into place.
A film by Peter Rosen