This week, music fans celebrate two composers who were pop culture musicians before their time: Leonard Bernstein and Itzhak Perlman.

He was a prodigiously gifted musician, a man of enormous energy and talent, who touched so many spheres of music.  His was a conductor who became front-page news in 1943 and brought Mahler back to the public’s ear in the 1960’s.  He was a composer who chronicled his beloved New York in musicals, notably “West Side Story,” and his religion in works like the “Chichester Psalms”.  He brought music to television viewers with the famous “Young Peoples’ Concerts”.  And those are just the highlights in the life of  Leonard Bernstein, born August 25, 1918.  

His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras, and from his music for West Side Story, Peter Pan, Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town, On The Waterfront, his Mass, and a range of other compositions, including three symphonies and many shorter chamber and solo works.

Bernstein was the first conductor to give numerous television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954 and continuing until his death. He was a skilled pianist, often conducting piano concertos from the keyboard.

As a composer he wrote in many styles encompassing symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music and pieces for the piano. Many of his works are regularly performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous popular and commercial success of West Side Story.

 

He was born in Tel Aviv in 1945, gave his first recital at age 10 and appeared on the same Ed Sullivan Show as the Rolling Stones.  He has sung in opera and performed on Sesame Street.  Today, Itzhak Perlman is recognized around the world as one of the greatest violinists of his generation, as well as a teacher and a cultural ambassador.  We invite you to join us and the music world as we celebrate the 70th birthday of Itzhak Perlman on Monday, August 31, as we hear many of his greatest recorded performances.

Perlman first became interested in the violin after hearing a classical music performance on the radio. At the age of three, he was denied admission to the Shulamit Conservatory for being too small to hold a violin. He instead taught himself how to play the instrument using a toy fiddle until he was old enough to study with Rivka Goldgart at the Shulamit Conservatory and at the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv, where he gave his first recital at age 10, before moving to the United States to study at the Juilliard School with the violin pedagogue Ivan Galamian and his assistant Dorothy DeLay.