Customer Reviews

Leonard Bernstein: The Rite of Spring in Rehearsal [VHS]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a fantastic look into the humanity that Bernstein created with this music. The video is a glimpse into the process of making music, and when Bernstein is making it, it's even better.

In this video you will become acquinted with one of the most notorius musical personalities of our time. Seeing what is behind the musical performance shows his real talent. It is clear his intentions were to express musical thought without pretentions. In this video you will see clearly why he drew huge masses of people to hear his concerts.

I wish the production in its entirety would have been featured.
Bernstein is such a big head and he intimidates kids and adults,
unlike videos of Stravinsky rehearsals.

In a squeltering humid summer music camp Lenny took a young orchestra, hand picked players through this one of the greatest scores of the 20th Century. It was so hot that during the break, (with constant cigarette in hand),(perhaps a glass of what looked like bourbon) Lenny wraps himself with a bare torso in a white wet towel. He explains vividly, well we know him for that, the old vitage Omnibus Fifties, early Sixties Young Peoples Television concerts were the first, and the last, for comparitively we find little classical music on PBS or educational TVs by comparison.And what there is, is only once a month perhaps more but not often. We should be able to hear/see classical music on Televeision, the Boob Tube once a week, How many can say they can do that. Not in the Midwest. In Stravinsky these early ballet scores,there are many points and levels of interpretations to discuss with this work,technical, balance problems, those of timbre, of entrance, and the hardest of all conveying that other sense of the primordial, the primeaval and primitive, making the music gestures suggest those elements in a convincing way. Lenny proceeds describing, the copulations of ancient animals,the heaviness of a dinosaur smashing, tropping, something we know now with Jurassic flicks obsessions; have things like that in your mind as you play this music he would say. You have to be graphic, just as graphic and extreme as the music, you need to come up to it, it will not go down to you, impossible. There are short interviews with the student musicians,all who learned a great deal from Lenny, well he is the best teacher there is for music. And he has devoted inordinate amounts of his career to it. Lenny conducts Stravinsky like Tchaikovsky like a warp speed joy ride from a birdseye view, meaning he goes for the overall timbre of the entire orchestral sound, nothing sticks out,quacking woodwinds, or percussion noises,Solti as well you'll find this approach, all the sound is compact, delivered in one powerful wall of sound. There is one rehearsal, and one entire performance.