0:00 Debussy: Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune 9:55 Dvořák: Slavonic Dance Op 46, No. 7 13:14 Ravel: Boléro 29:21 Sibelius: Valse Triste 35:37 Vivaldi: Concerto in C major, RV 559 (I. Larghetto - Allegro) 44:37 Stravinsky: The Firebird Suite (The Princesses' Khorovod - Infernal Dance of King Kashchei)
33:13 I dont think Ukrainians in the US would take that comment(referring to Kyiv as a Russian city) too well if Bernstein had done this concert today!!
I saw him when I was a kid right before he died; it was at Tanglewood. I remember sitting on the grass... I was young and dumb and didn't appreciate it like I would now. My dad, who loved, understood, and played music, told told me never to forget that I was listening to an orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein. It was amazing, I just wish I wasn't 12 at the time and that I could go back again.
I love Leonard Bernstein and he grew and changed and became very aware of racism and colonialism, so it was shocking to see him in 1958 talking about jazz, which was invented and developed by black people and based in part on African rhythms, and then appropriated by whites and give no acknowledgement of that fact at all. Similarly, there is American Indian music that has its own instruments and sounds which Dvorak learned from an ethnomusicologist who documented that music. It is very sobering to see what the state of consciousness was at that time and what we're still contending with today.
Hindemith died in 1963. He had been forced to leave his native Germany when Hitler came to power; the Nazis regarded Hindemith's music as 'cultural Bolshevism'.
"Also Sprach Zarathustra" was first performed in 1896, the same year that also saw the first performance of Puccini's operatic masterwork, "La Boheme ". Bernstein performed and recorded "Boheme " in his later years.
These specials were aired at a time when the commercial TV networks were the outlet for classical music on the small screen. (The Bernstein specials were aired on CBS.)
I can't find words to thank you for this compilation as I've looked it up for decades in DVDs outlets... and nothing or impossibly expensive. It would be really marvellous if you could permit other youtubers to save this collection in our playlists. Thanks a lot.
"Agnew alliteration " 😂😉 remember the very special juwish sense of tragicomic humor; probably a way to not losing it beacuse of 🤔 u get the picture of course U do !! sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiro_Agnew
This brings back memories of watching the Young People's Concerts in western Ohio on our Hotpoint TV and wishing I could be in the audience at Carnegie Hall.
Because I am Māori and actually care about this, I am going to take the time and emotional labour to put together a list of all the comments in this 1958 episode that absolutely have not aged well: 10:35 "Sometimes it's just folk music, very simple songs-or sometimes not even songs; maybe just prayers for rain banged out on Congo drums, [DEMONSTRATE] or a sort of primitive chanting, in Arab style. (BAD IMITATION)." 12:58 "Some of you said gypsy, some of you said Hungarian, it's the same idea." 15:53 "They come from everywhere. But we haven't got hours to be here and list them all, so you see, that is our problem." 19:20 "Indian music has nothing to do with most of us; our forefathers were not Indians, and so their music is not our music. We didn't grow up ourselves banging on primitive drums and yelling war whoops." 27:00 "But it's hard for us Americans to feel that it's our music, the way a Russian feels about a Tchaikovsky symphony. In fact, those Indian and Negro themes even sound a little strange and exotic to us if we tell the truth. So we still didn't have a real American music, not yet." 32:33 "You see at last there was something like an American folk music that everybody understood: a real natural folk influence, jazz, much more real and natural than any Indian love calls or Negro spirituals could ever be." I am not going to say anything else about those comments, but let them speak for themselves. This is very reflective of the time they were said in, and what was considered okay to be said nationally, and also how little of a voice the Native American tribal communities and the Negro communities had. I shall leave these here.
Can anyone else hear Maestro Bernstein humming along with his own conducting??? A little distracting, but kind of part of the charm. And yes, I cannot agree more with his approach of educating his audience based on pieces and images familiar to them, it really draws them in.
This was broadcast when I was a boy but we also saw films of these episodes in school. I wonder if any teacher or principal would have the courage to show this today.
Bernstein became somehow eternal through his music. As long as there will be people to listen to it, there will exist a part of him through his music. Now I understand why it is said that that Bernstein in one of the musicians with the widest music understanding.
