Description
Book SynopsisLeonard Bernstein was arguably the most highly esteemed, influential, and charismatic American classical music personality of the twentieth century. Conductor, composer, pianist, writer, educator, and human rights activist, Bernstein truly led a life of Byronic intensity--passionate, risk-taking, and convention-breaking.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. 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. 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 w
Trade ReviewThe interview is replete with a generous helping of the boast and bombast which was Bernstein's stock-in-trade, which one either loves or hates ... The account makes riveting reading. * Classical Music *
Rarely has a composer or conductor enjoyed such public adulation, and this lovely little book goes some way towards explaining why Bernstein did. A transcription of the "last long interview" with him, conducted in the year before his death, it captures Bernstein on sparkling form... Dinner with Lenny is an evocative tribute, not just to Bernstein's musical gifts but his ever-active mind. * The Financial Times *
[In Dinner with Lenny] ancedotes flow freely as the casual obscenities and gushing Yiddish emoting. The most telling quip comes in Cott's perceptive introduction: just before a concert at the Vatican, followed by an audience with the Pope, a well-wishing friend sent Bernstein a telegram: 'Remember: the ring, not the lips.' * The Spectator *
Jonathan Cott is gifted at making a discussion - presented in the formatting of a play script, with occasional stage directions - feel like a live recording, while we wander from fascinating reflections about languages, the mystic number seven, and Hitler's effect on 20th-century music, to lovely anecdotes such as the one about Bernstein's late wife washing the eccentric Glenn Gould's hair. * The Independent on Sunday *
Lenny is witty, erudite, epigrammatic and wicked - filled with off-the cuff reminiscences about friends, colleagues and reflection on major composers. * The Times *
What Cott has achieved, though this final interview, is to make Lenny speak and sing again. It's been said that if you remember an evening with Lenny, you weren't really there. The genius of Cott's book is not only to remember but to recall with pinpoint accuracy and sympathy the flame of Leonard Bernstein that burned so brightly and so true. * New Statesman *
A feast * New York Times *
I found this terrific book quite impossible to put down ... Here is a vibrant and authentic Leonard Bernstein, speaking freely, frankly and extremely entertainingly, but never wavering in his raging passion for music, or his simple lust for life. * International Record Review *
Table of Contents1. PRELUDE ; 2. DINNER WITH LENNY ; 3. POSTLUDE ; NOTES ; SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ; ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
