- Person
- Leonard Bernstein
- Lived
- 1918–1990
- Field
- Music
- From
- American
The story
Leonard Bernstein's own life as a conductor had been shaped by a summer school. In 1940 he attended the first season of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, where he studied with Serge Koussevitzky, and he returned there nearly every summer for the rest of his life to teach young musicians. In his last decade he set out to recreate that nurturing environment elsewhere.
In the 1980s he co-founded three academies for young musicians. The Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, a summer academy he started in 1982 with the orchestra's manager Ernest Fleischmann and Daniel Lewis of the University of Southern California, came first. In 1987 he founded the Orchestra Academy of the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in northern Germany, taking its students on tours to Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union. The third was the Pacific Music Festival.
The project began as a plan for Bernstein and the London Symphony Orchestra to work in China, but after the Tiananmen Square crackdown of June 1989 the organisers moved it to Japan, and on 6 December 1989 Bernstein announced in London that the first festival would be held in Sapporo. He founded it there in the summer of 1990, together with Michael Tilson Thomas and the London Symphony Orchestra. Its aim was to give intensive musical training to talented young students from across the Pacific region, and the first season brought together 123 young musicians from 18 countries. In his opening address Bernstein said he had decided to devote most of the time and energy he had left to education and to sharing with younger people. He worked with the students as artistic director that summer but had to cut his stay short because of ill health. It was his final summer: he gave his last concert at Tanglewood in August and died in New York that October.
The festival outlived him and became a lasting institution, held every summer in Sapporo. Its later leaders have included Christoph Eschenbach, Charles Dutoit, Fabio Luisi and Valery Gergiev, with conductors such as Marin Alsop, Bernard Haitink and Riccardo Muti leading its orchestra. According to the Leonard Bernstein Office, a quarter of a century after its founding more than 3,200 young musicians had taken part.
Bernstein said he was proudest of his achievements as a teacher, and the festival carries that mission forward every year.
Why it matters
The festival continues Bernstein's work of training young musicians, carrying his teaching to new generations across Asia and the Pacific.
About Leonard Bernstein
Conductor & composer; "West Side Story," New York Philharmonic, music educator to a generation through the Young People's Concerts.
More about Leonard Bernstein
- Leonard Bernstein turned a prize into a school programmeWhen Leonard Bernstein won Japan's Praemium Imperiale in 1990, he used the 100,000 dollar prize to start an arts-in-education project that became the Artful Learning programme.
- Leonard Bernstein taught classical music to millions on TVLeonard Bernstein, the first American-born music director of the New York Philharmonic, wrote and hosted 53 televised Young People's Concerts, shown in more than 40 countries.
- Leonard Bernstein brought Mahler's symphonies back to lifeLeonard Bernstein was a critical figure in the modern revival of Gustav Mahler, recording his symphonies and helping make them central to the orchestral repertoire.
- Bernstein's Harvard lectures linked music and languageIn 1973 Leonard Bernstein gave six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, The Unanswered Question, applying ideas from linguistics to explain how music communicates.
- Bernstein's Ode to Freedom marked the Berlin Wall's fallOn Christmas Day 1989 Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven's Ninth in East Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Wall, changing the word joy to freedom for an audience of about 100 million.
- Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story reinvented the musicalLeonard Bernstein's score for West Side Story, which opened on Broadway in 1957, fused jazz, Latin rhythms and symphonic technique and is still performed around the world.
- Bernstein's Young People's Concerts taught millions musicFrom 1958 to 1972 Leonard Bernstein presented 53 televised Young People's Concerts, often called the most influential music education series ever produced for television.
- Leonard Bernstein conducted to support Amnesty InternationalLeonard Bernstein gave benefit concerts for Amnesty International in Munich in 1976 and Berlin in 1979, and set up a fund in his wife's name to aid human rights activists.
- Leonard Bernstein was an early champion of AIDS researchLeonard Bernstein took part in one of the earliest AIDS fundraisers in 1983 and later helped raise the first million dollars for amfAR's community-based clinical trials.
- Leonard Bernstein led a Journey for Peace to HiroshimaIn 1985 Leonard Bernstein took the European Community Youth Orchestra on a Journey for Peace tour, performing at the Hiroshima Peace Ceremony on the 40th anniversary of the bombing.
Sources
- Leonard Bernstein Wikipedia
- Leonard Bernstein: Educator Leonard Bernstein Office
- Pacific Music Festival Wikipedia
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