Thoughts of the Day
“Pulcinella” month. On opening night of the reconstituted Alice Tully Hall (2/22), David Robertson conducted Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella” Suite. On 3/8, Cho-Liang Lin and Jean-Yves Thibaudet played “Suite Italienne,” the composer’s arrangement of the music for violin and piano. The next evening, Pierre Boulez led the Chicago Symphony and three vocalists at Carnegie Hall in the complete ballet. So, New York, what about the “Suite Italienne” transcription for cello and piano?
Lenny and Schuy. I opened the Times on 3/9 to see that Leonard Bernstein’s children have donated “the carefully preserved contents” of their father’s composing studio to Indiana University. On the obit page was the sad news that Schuyler Chapin had died at age 86 over the weekend. They met on October 14, 1959, when Chapin was the new director of Bernstein’s exclusive recording label, Columbia Masterworks, and the relationship deepened into a personal friendship that ended with the conductor’s death on October 14, 1990–a coincidence that Chapin dubbed “serendipity of the calendar” in his affectionate, witty memoir of the conductor, Leonard Bernstein: Notes from a Friend. And now a final coincidence. I pulled the little book from my shelf and with renewed delight devoured its 171 pages of large type in an hour (I’m a slow reader). “How do I explain the impact of Leonard Bernstein on me?” Chapin asks. “How do I explain my love for this colorful, explosive, wildly talented, sometimes impossible man?” For those of us who knew Bernstein only from a distance, thank goodness for those recordings and videos . . . and for his eloquent friend.