CU hosts Leonard Bernstein-inspired Young People's Concert
By Cassa Niedringhaus - Daily Camera CU News
September 28, 2018
The chatter of hundreds of local third-graders filled the University of Colorado's Macky Auditorium on Friday as they awaited a Young People's Concert celebrating the late composer Leonard Bernstein.
After the CU Symphony Orchestra led with a performance of "Overture to Candide," Jamie Bernstein came on stage. Jamie Bernstein, one of Leonard Bernstein's three children, is an author and filmmaker and hosted the concert. It was one of dozens of events the CU College of Music organized during September and October to celebrate what would have been Leonard Bernstein's 100th birthday.
"Wasn't that music delicious?" she asked the schoolchildren. She described for them her father's meteoric rise to fame, when as a 25-year-old he filled in as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and she played a clip from one of his Young People's Concerts, which were broadcast on CBS.
She also told them about the time, when she was a child, that the famous composer Samuel Barber came to her home and told her and her siblings to call him "Sam Sam the Garbage Man," to which the third-graders in the audience responded with laughs.
Glenn Dicterow, a violinist and former concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, made a guest appearance to play Barber's "Violin Concerto" with the orchestra.