A quick listening guide to Leonard Bernstein

We won't get into anything that wasn't his compositions.

A+:
West Side Story (obviously. Look, it's probably the greatest theater work this country ever produced. Your life is poorer without knowing it. The best way to know it is to find the Spielberg movie and watch it on the biggest screen you can find. In the meantime, listen to the original Broadway soundtrack, which has still never been bettered.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-oyVRuPRlY&list=PL2HvIoVJcahcqRssUsnv0g8lV3W-I2TfL&index=10

A:
Candide (WSS's companion piece. It doesn't work as a show. It's just one thing, after another, after another, but along with Porgy and Bess, it just might be the most amazing music ever composed for Broadway)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kovAiSbTyBI&list=OLAK5uy_l84_XoNl81Szssi1_CjfkTqPVENs6x1NQ&index=2&fbclid=IwAR0Rk1eAZIXeEBoLEALQyqz4JJRxe69UA0KUFWdUUVV668JCJlvnPIHq8AQ

On the Waterfront Suite: (Lenny's only movie score. It's one of the all-time movie scores, and here are twenty minutes of the most evocative music ever composed about New York) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojnVIW3wRJo

Fancy Free: (Bernstein's ballet on the subject of three sailors with a day of shore leave in New York. This is the piece in 1944 when Lenny truly becomes Lenny, that brash, unmistakably New York voice that combines classical and jazz in a third stream fifteen years before third stream jazz was a genre.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G91xB1a2ftU&list=OLAK5uy_nITeKxfMVD1yTTkXKwFZ3piLWwTId5WLw

Symphonic Dances from West Side Story: (just the orchestral music - and a little bit more - that gives as good a sense of New York as anything in On the Waterfront) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_NelA3ZW4g

A-

On The Town: (That incredible first show of his, based on Fancy Free. Another one of the most incredible shows put on, as a soundtrack the love songs are a little more insipid than onstage, maybe because it never got a great performance.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t062tjKmK_I&list=PLaEnMuxCkiA4h6JHoYJqRN2H1xQS4Yg7W&index=16

Jeremiah Symphony: (A biblical evocation of the prophet Jeremiah and his lamentations, inveighing against sin and in the middle, a depiction of the orgiastic sinners he so loathes - you may psychologize away, but written in 1942 and knowing the destruction that would soon make itself public, it's very difficult not to be deeply moved) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uic4qcyDmDQ

B+:

(Bernstein's 20 minute sacred piece that sets ancient Hebrew psalms as pure Broadway) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnrZGTmMjYc

B:

Wonderful Town: It's almost pure fluff, but it's fun fluff) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNWpiNPK8tg&list=OLAK5uy_lIqAhr80hXDCsO-WBOrcEPIp_u3fJMFKc&index=11

B-:
The Age of Anxiety: (At this point, I think there's only one movement that matters in this symphony: the jazz movement. Oh my god I love this.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftPNojzZYHw&list=OLAK5uy_nZTOZ1rFILOj3JB2u2hcxygtufuCnAHZ4&index=18

C: Serenade - another work of Lenny in pretentious mode, a musical depiction of Plato's Symposium on the nature of love. It has a lot of exciting stuff, but let's get serious, this is not philosophy.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpROC4gsZhQ

D: Kaddish Symphony: (It's not good... but getting rid of Bernstein's own pretentious text helped enormously, and replacing it with the testimony of Holocaust Survivor Samuel Pisar -Anthony Blinken's stepfather - makes it come much closer to working. It's not a masterpiece, but at least with some moral weight you get closer to what he must have been aiming for.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTAnmHPTKEk

F:

Mass: Oh god it sucks.