Two projects bring Leonard Bernstein back once again into the spotlight

Ahead of what would have been the 103rd birthday of composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, two new projects are burnishing his already considerable legacy: the upcoming documentary "Bernstein’s Wall" and the multimedia experience "Bernstein’s Answer," recently installed at the Ravinia Festival.

Regarded as “one of the most phenomenally gifted and successful Renaissance men of music in American history,” Bernstein made several lifetimes worth of achievements before his untimely death at 72 in 1990: three ballets, three operas, nine musical theater works and dozens of orchestral, choral, vocal, chamber music and instrumental pieces. The first American-born conductor to lead a major American orchestra (the New York Philharmonic), as well as “the first American celebrity conductor,” he also was equally well known as an arts advocate and social-rights activist.

The latter role comes to the fore in the documentary "Bernstein’s Wall" (2021), which had its world premiere at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival in June. Written and directed by Douglas Tirola, the documentary.
frames Bernstein as “a humanitarian who lived for activism as much as he did for music,” writes critic Owen Gleiberman in Variety. In the Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney observes that the doc depicts Bernstein as “an advocate for social change, using the arts as a delivery system for freedom and equality, peace and unity.” Produced and distributed by New York-based 4th Row Films, "Bernstein’s Wall" will have a theatrical release nationally, including a Chicago-area run.

Over at Ravinia, where Bernstein led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra 11 times from 1944 to 1956, the festival recently unveiled "Bernstein’s Answer," a high-tech, 12-minute audiovisual exhibit, narrated by Bobby McFerrin. The exhibit is hosted in the Music Box, a 65-seat theater with a museum gallery space, created by BRC Imagination Arts, noted for its work at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in downstate Springfield and the Ryman Auditorium Backstage Tour in Nashville. (Admission is free to all Ravinia ticketholders, and the Music Box, just north of the dining pavilion, is open on most concert nights.)

BRC describes "Bernstein’s Answer" as “a transformative journey that reveals the power of great music to thrill, transport and heal mankind, seen through the eyes, heard through the ears and created through the hands and heart of Leonard Bernstein.”

The exhibit’s name and premise references the philosophical query — ”What does music mean?” — that Bernstein famously posed in his first Young People’s Concert, the series of nationally televised programs organized and led by him from 1958 to 1972.

That series overlapped his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic, from 1958 to 1969. Before and after his N.Y. Phil stint, Bernstein returned to Chicago to guest conduct the CSO, each time at Orchestra Hall, in 1951 and three decades later, in 1988. His 1988 residency produced two recordings of Shostakovich Symphonies No. 1 and 7, on Deutsche Grammophon, and tracks from those discs are linked below.

And coming in December: Steven Spielberg’s long-awaited remake of the 1961 film version of “West Side Story,” based on the hit 1957 musical by Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins and Arthur Laurents.