Young People's Concerts: The Sound of an Orchestra (1965) (TV)

User Rating:

8.6/10   

Director:

Roger Englander

Writer:

Leonard Bernstein (writer)

Release Date:

14 December 1965 (USA)

Genre:

Music

Cast

Leonard Bernstein

...

Himself (Conductor and Commentator)

Runtime:

55 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)

One of the most fascinating and entertaining of this series

From 1958 until 1972, four times a year, CBS broadcast a series of concerts that created television history- the New York Phiharmonic "Young People's Concerts", narrated and conducted by Leonard Bernstein, twenty-eight of which are currently being broadcast twice a week on the cable channel Trio for the first time since their original airings. These programs introduced millions of young people (like myself) to some of the world's greatest musical masterpieces for the first time.

But if they had been merely concerts, they would not have been nearly as well remembered. What made them so magnificent was that Bernstein explained the music to the audience, and no one has ever been able to explain classical music like Bernstein. Not only did he have a brilliant, conversational way of speaking, he was eloquent and poetic and his explanations were never dry and dull, nor were they condescending. He also wrote every one of his scripts himself.

This is one of his most informative, entertaining and even humorous programs, and one which surely must have made conductors like Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy squirm. In it, he shows us how NOT to play a classical piece - by conducting the New York Philharmonic in a deliberately ultra-romantic, schmaltzy, wildly exaggerated performance of part of the slow movement of Haydn's "Symphony no. 88", and then, with tongue-in-cheek, pointing out, one by one, all the wrong things that the orchestra did. (It is Bernstein's position that an orchestra should not have its own "sound"; that its sound must vary with each composer, and although Bernstein is tactful enough not to mention any orchestras by name, one does instantly think of the Philadelphia Orchestra during the Stokowski and Ormandy eras when he speaks about orchestras having "their own sound".)

He also demonstrates the differences in orchestral sounds in German and French music, showing us how a given instrument must change its tone quality depending on the composer, and by doing this, he gives the viewer a crash course in the different qualities of orchestral sound, and skillfully deflects any criticism of his own interpretations (Bernstein in those days was often severely taken to his task by so-called "music critics", especially for his interpretations of eighteenth-century works, and he himself did record drastically altered editions of some of Vivaldi's works, as well as a highly dramatic Bach "St. Matthew Passion", one of his most successful, if musically inauthentic, recordings.).

This is one of the greatest music appreciation programs ever made, and part of a series which should never be forgotten--one which deserves to be run and rerun over and over on television.