By Howard Reich - Chicago Tribune
July 28, 2019
Though Bernstein remains a legendary figure who died in 1990 at age 72, the man behind the mystique shone through lucidly on Saturday evening, thanks in large part to the narration of Jamie Bernstein, his daughter. Such onstage recitations often range from ponderous to irritating, but Jamie Bernstein’s expertly crafted script – and exuberant delivery – took us inside the man’s life in exquisitely succinct fashion.
Read MoreBy Scott C. Morgan - Daily Herald
June 14, 2019
Centennial celebrations tied to the birth of late composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein officially ended last year. But the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park is keeping the party going with "Bernstein 101: The Celebration Continues," featuring a series of classical concerts, stage performances, film screenings and the Grammy Museum's traveling "Leonard Bernstein at 100" exhibit…
Jamie Bernstein is returning to Ravinia this summer to promote her father's legacy as a concert narrator and a pre-screening panelist to two Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances: "Lenny: A Musical Portrait in Symphony, Song and Story" on Saturday, July 27, and "On the Waterfront" (a live performance of Bernstein's score for the 1954 film).
Read MoreBy Bill Brownstein - Montreal Gazette
May 28, 2019
The choirs of Congregation Shaar Hashomayim and St. Matthias Anglican Church will join forces for the first time at a tribute to Leonard Bernstein — a sign of religious unity in a time of division.
Congregation Shaar Hashomayim and St. Matthias Anglican Church are two of the oldest religious institutions in the city, dating back, respectively, to 1846 and 1875. They boast among the most renowned choirs in the land. They are across the street from one another, mere steps away, in Westmount. Yet for the first time in their histories, their choirs will be joining forces on stage, in a tribute to the music of legendary maestro and composer Leonard Bernstein.
Read MoreHosted by Bill Radke - KUOW.org
April 1, 2019
Leonard Bernstein was the most famous American conductor/composer of his day. His daughter Jamie, a filmmaker and music educator, has written a memoir of her life with him called Famous Father Girl. She’s in town for the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, which is screening a documentary called “Leonard Bernstein: Larger Than Life.”
Read MoreBy Dusty Somers - Special to The Seattle Times
March 20, 2019
To watch Leonard Bernstein conduct is to be brought under the spell of his exuberance — the grand sweep of his gestures, the intense rictus of his expression. Georg Wübbolt’s hourlong documentary “Leonard Bernstein: Larger Than Life” opens with a montage of impassioned conducting, and the effect is electrifying.
Read MoreBy Andrew Taylor - The Sydney Morning Herald
March 14, 2019
Six decades is a long time to live with an attention seeker, but Jamie Bernstein has only kind words to say about her younger, showier sibling.
“I was five when it came out so I can barely remember a time in my life when we didn’t have West Side Story around us,” she says. “We love our fourth sibling, but I bet our Dad got impatient with his fourth child because it got so much attention at the expense of all those other children he composed.”
Read MoreBy Judith Reveal - New York Journal of Books
January 2019
“This is a book that is read once, and then once again, and again—each time gaining new insight into a true maestro.”
Leonard Bernstein 100 by Steve J. Sherman with Jamie Bernstein, is a love affair between Leonard Bernstein and the camera, with invaluable information about the maestro’s life and career.
Read MoreBy Rena Silverman - New York Times
December 11, 1976
A collection of photographs of Mr. Bernstein, shot by some of the most famous photographers of the 20th century, capture the American classical music maestro on and off the stage.
Read MoreBy Keith Mankin - Theater Jones
November 8, 2018
Dallas — One of the outstanding passions of Leonard Bernstein’s life was his dedication to popularizing classical music. Nowhere was this more evident in his work on the NY Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts. These regular Saturday afternoon lectures dissected both large and fine points of music from specific composers to basics of rhythm and harmony. Although they began before the great conductor’s tenure and continue to this day, almost a quarter century after his death, they are intrinsically woven into Bernstein’s legacy.
The legacy of teaching and popularization has been carried forth by another Bernstein, his daughter, Jamie, who is a musician, author and teacher in her own right and, along with her siblings, a director of the Bernstein Foundation. She has developed programs for the younger generation that are similar in scope and tone to her father’s, with the added benefit of being able to use his prodigious catalogue of music as their subject. One such program, The Bernstein Beat, will be presented on as part of the DSO’s weekend long Bernstein Festival during the continued celebration of the composer’s Centenary.
Read MoreBy Joy Horowitz - Los Angeles Review of Books
October 18, 2018
THE CENTENNIAL OF Leonard Bernstein’s birth has inspired lavish, seemingly unending celebrations around the world — concerts, museum exhibits, and competing biopics starring Bradley Cooper and Jake Gyllenhaal extolling the musical genius of the great conductor, composer, and showman. But there is one clear-eyed insider’s view that should not be missed: a new memoir from the maestro’s first-born daughter, Jamie Bernstein. Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein is a remarkable tribute, not simply because the author reveals deeply intimate aspects of her family history but because she does so with an abiding love and honesty.
Read MoreBy 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.
Read MoreProduced by Mark Hudspeth - CBS News
September 23, 2018
He remains one of music's indisputable legends, and this year marks the centennial of Leonard Bernstein's birth. Among the celebrants is our Mo Rocca:
Jamie Bernstein, the first-born of Bernstein's three children, took Rocca through the Grammy Museum exhibit now touring the country in honor of her father's 100th birthday – part of a worldwide celebration of his life and work.
Read MoreBy Winston Skinner - The Newnan Times-Herald
September 20, 2018
When Cathe Nixon introduced Jamie Bernstein to the audience at the Nixon Centre on Tuesday, she asked how people thought Bernstein’s last name should be pronounced.
Someone correctly suggested the last syllable should be pronounced “stine.” Nixon, who directs the local arts center, said she was remembering the correct pronunciation because of “Steinway,” the premiere piano brand.
“Or Einstein,” Bernstein piped up in response, eliciting laughter from the group of about 75 gathered on the stage at the center.
Bernstein spent just under an hour remembering growing up in a home that included her father, famed musician Leonard Bernstein, and his talented actress wife, Felicia Montealegre. She also read two selections from her new book, “Famous Father Girl.”
Read MoreBy Peter Alexander - Boulder Weekly
September 20, 2018
The University of Colorado College of Music has joined the rest of the musical world to celebrate the centennial of the unique American composer, conductor, teacher, writer, lecturer and humanitarian Leonard Bernstein.
Just about the entire College of Music is represented in the months-long festival, from individual faculty members to the University Symphony, the Eklund Opera Program and even the Marching Band.
The celebration gains an extra dimension starting Monday, Sept. 24, with the arrival on campus of three prominent guests: Jamie Bernstein, the composer’s daughter and author of the recently released memoir Famous Father Girl; violinist Glenn Dicterow, concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for 34 years who played many performances Bernstein conducted; and Carol Oja, William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University and one of the leading Bernstein scholars.
Read MoreBy Lottie Peterson Johnson - Deseret News
September 10, 2018
If anything, the party has only gotten bigger in Utah since that late summer day. It’s the reason the composer’s firstborn, Jamie Bernstein, traveled from New York to the Beehive State just two days after her father would’ve turned 100 years old. On Aug. 27, a few of Leonard Bernstein’s family and friends — including the conductor’s last student before passing away — kicked off the 26th annual Moab Music Festival.
Read MoreBy Rachel Fixsen - Moab Sun News
August 30, 2018
Last week, on Aug. 25, Google’s jazzy, animated banner doodle featured a young musician mastering his art and achieving notoriety and success. That musician is world-renowned American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, who died in 1990 — the cartoon commemorated his 100th birthday. Events across the world are likewise paying tribute to Bernstein this month, including the release of a memoir by Bernstein’s oldest daughter, Jamie Bernstein. She will be giving a reading from her book, Famous Father Girl, at Back of Beyond Books on Wednesday, Sept. 5.
“[It’s] extremely well written,” said Andy Nettell, owner of Back of Beyond Books, of the memoir. “Its a very intimate portrait of who her father was... On one hand you hear the very personal stories of when they would go out as a family and go dancing and attending the family parties with all these literati and notables. And then on the other hand, seeing her dad on the world stage, whether in Berlin when the wall was coming down, or in New York, or wherever he was performing.
Read MoreBy Fred Cohn - Opera News
September 1, 2018
“WHY DID DADDY always have to make everything so squirm-worthy?” asks Jamie Bernstein in her riveting memoir of life with her celebrated father. It may be a universal truth that parents will embarrass their children, but as Famous Father Girl makes clear, Leonard Bernstein, in his perpetual self-aggrandizement, subjected Jamie and her siblings to all-but-unimaginable tribulations.
Read MoreBy Tom Huizenga - NPR Deceptive Cadence
August 25, 2018
Jamie Bernstein can't call her childhood a typical one. On any given weekend, she might find Lauren Bacall, Isaac Stern, Richard Avedon, Mike Nichols, Stephen Sondheim, Lillian Hellman or Sidney Lumet hanging out at her house. Jamie's father was Leonard Bernstein.
The celebrated conductor, composer of West Side Story and host of television's Young People's Concerts was born 100 years ago, Aug. 25, 1918. To mark the centennial, Jamie Bernstein has published Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein, a frank recollection of family life and the struggle to find herself amid the "blinding light" that was Leonard Bernstein, who died in 1990.
Read MoreJeff Lunden - NPR Morning Edition
August 24, 2018
"When my father climbed up on that podium in Carnegie Hall and conducted the New York Philharmonic on a national radio broadcast that Sunday afternoon, that was why it was front page news the next day. Like, 'Local boy makes good,'" says Jamie Bernstein, the late conductor's daughter.
Read MoreBroadway World
August 23, 2018
Copland House's 2018-19 mainstage season will offer celebrations aplenty! Ranging widely across more than a century of American music, the popular series is Copland House's 10th at Westchester County's majestic Merestead estate in Mount Kisco, NY. Hailed by The New York Times for "all the richness of its offerings, first-rate fare, and reputation for quality," the series has become a destination for an enthusiastic and growing audience of musical adventurers seeking discoveries of the new, old, and unexpected.
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