Marin Alsop conductor
Nicolas Hodges piano

Ives The Unanswered Question
Bernstein Symphony 2 (Age of Anxiety)
Shostakovich Symphony 5



You couldn’t have encountered two more different characters than Bernstein and Shostakovich, and yet their music shares so much: loneliness, exuberance, caustic wit, dazzling technique and the bluesy shadow of jazz. Bernstein’s symphony-concerto trips along like a lively conversation, embracing a magical array of textures from the serene stillness of its piano’s solitary first cadences to the striding honky-tonk of the same instrument’s Masque section. If Bernstein was the product of an Age of Anxiety, then Shostakovich lived through one: his everuplifting Fifth Symphony is a testament of survival against profound and overwhelming odds.

This concert is part of The Bernstein Project at Southbank Centre, which over the season includes concerts, film, debate and participation events, led by the Festival Artistic Director, Marin Alsop.

To hear selected movements from this concert, select a track below to open the music file. (Windows Media Player required.)
Bernstein: Symphony 2 - Part I: Prologue
Bernstein: Symphony 2 - Part I: The Seven Ages: Variation I
Bernstein: Symphony No. 2 - Part II: The Epilogue
Shostakovich: Symphony 5 in D minor - I. Moderato
Shostakovich: Symphony 5 in D minor - IV. Allegro non troppo

More about ‘Lenny’ – Leonard Bernstein
Show-off, visionary, playboy, pedagogue, clown, genius. Leonard Bernstein, the most indefinable musician to ever hold a conductor’s baton, arrived a century ago. Adored, condemned, respected, worshipped – whatever he was, ‘Lenny’ proved the most important American classical musician of the 20th century, introducing hundreds of thousands to the symphonies of Beethoven and Mahler whilst using his own works to charge through the perceived boundaries that separated art music and popular music.

Bernstein could have made it as a pianist, conductor or composer, and yet he chose all three – marrying these disciplines with his own sense of passion, fun and originality. By all accounts, every performance he conducted was an occasion, no matter how far-flung his sometimes eccentric interpretations. His stage manner prompted many a written description, one notably from his biographer Humphrey Burton, who tells of the maestro taking an umpteenth curtain call in front of the New York Philharmonic and offering a suave kiss to his young conducting assistant, Marin Alsop.

Alsop has gone on to become a leading conductor in America and Europe. She joins us this season for a look at Bernstein’s concert works. Despite the raging popularity of his masterpiece West Side Story, he longed for recognition for the uplifting, surging profundity of his symphonies and delicate exuberance of his choral works. The perception was that Bernstein was simply too talented; he couldn’t be that good at conducting Mahler, creating musicals and writing symphonies, could he? Well yes, he could. And we have the compositional legacy to prove the case for Bernstein the composer.

These apparent contradictions troubled Bernstein himself too – not only the conflicting responsibilities of the composer and the conductor, but also his apparent bisexuality and the social demands of his incomparable personality. But through the years Bernstein retained his energy, openness and creative genius as long as music was there to fuel and inspire him. As for Marin Alsop, ‘I didn’t mind telling Lenny he was the greatest in the world’, she recalled in a recent interview, ‘because he was.’


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