Leonard Bernstein was arguably the most highly esteemed, influential, and charismatic American classical music personality of the twentieth century.
Now, this full-length version provides the reader with a unique, you-are-there perspective on what it was like to converse with this gregarious, witty, candid, and inspiring American dynamo..
Studs Terkel called the Interview astonishing and revelatory.
After Rolling Stone magazine published an abridged version of the conversation in 1990, the Chicago Tribune praised it as an extraordinary Interview filled with passion, wit, and acute analysis.
If I don\'t become Brahms or Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky when I\'m conducting their works, then it won\'t be a great performance.
If you can do that, you\'re a conductorand if you can\'t, you\'re not.
And of course, Bernstein talks of conducting, advising students to look at the score and make it come alive as if they were the composer.
He was a madman, a megalomaniac), and politics (lamenting the brainlessness, the mindlessness, the carelessness, and the heedlessness of the Reagans of the world).
Bernstein comes alive again, with vodka glass in hand, singing, humming, and making pointed comments on a wide array of topics, from popular music (the Beatles were the best songwriters since Gershwin), to great composers (Wagner was always in a psychotic frenzy.
Now, in Dinner with Lenny , Cott provides a complete account of this remarkable dialogue in which Bernstein discourses with disarming frankness, humor, and intensity on matters musical, pedagogical, political, psychological, spiritual, and the unabashedly personal.
In November 1989, just a year before his death, Bernstein invited writer Jonathan Cott to his country home in Fairfield, Connecticut for what turned out to be his Last major interview--an unprecedented and astonishingly frank twelve-hour conversation.
Conductor, composer, pianist, writer, educator, and human rights activist, Bernstein truly led a life of Byronic intensity--passionate, risk-taking, and convention-breaking.
Leonard Bernstein was arguably the most highly esteemed, influential, and charismatic American classical music personality of the twentieth century
