By Jamie Bernstein - The Nation
June 1, 2018
He was blithely unaware of how his journalistic cutting edge sliced one family into ribbons—mine.
Such an outpouring of encomiums for Tom Wolfe upon his death—the long obits, the lavish photos of his sartorial snappiness… it has all made me a little queasy.
Read MoreBy Jamie Bernstein - Classical.org
April 3, 2018
Editor’s note: In this post, Jamie Bernstein blogs about two weeks of sparkling Bernstein performances from Chicago, Colorado Springs, New York City, Washington DC, Scottsdale, and Memphis — many of which featured inspiring young musicians.
Read MoreBy Jamie Bernstein - Classical.org
February 12, 2018
Getting from New York City to Philadelphia is a breeze. In a little over an hour, the train pulled into beautiful, be-vaulted 30th St. Station.
I settled into my hotel room, directly opposite the clock tower atop Philadelphia’s famously beautiful City Hall. From my window perch on the 10th floor, I could have contemplated the ornamentation and sculpture for hours! But, I had a date with my young friend Juliana to grab an early tapas dinner (they have great food in Philly) and then bustle the few blocks in the freezing wind to Verizon Hall to catch the Philly Pops concert, which was devoted entirely to a celebration of Bernstein at 100.
The conductor was our longtime pal David Abell, who worked with our dad back in the day and has been a lifelong Leonard Bernstein (LB) booster. (He was fresh off the plane from having conducted “Songfest” in London the week before.)
Read MoreBy Jamie Bernstein - The Huffington Post
October 23, 2017
This is what women my age used to do back then...
How uncannily connected they were, those two recent headlines: the death of Hugh Hefner, closely followed by the spectacular undoing of Harvey Weinstein. It was a kind of double obituary (one hopes) for the image of that 20th century American man of success, and the delicious perquisites that adorned his achievement.
Read MoreBy Jamie Bernstein - Huffington Post
October 18, 2017
The word “shitstorm” had not yet been coined, but that is what the situation became.
When we fret over the intense polarization in our culture today; when we shrink from the shrill tones of TV news and social media; when we despair over the callousness of the White House toward issues of race, police brutality and peaceful protest ― we might gain insight from looking back a handful of decades to see how similarly divided we were in another era.
Read MoreBy Jamie Bernstein - Opera News
May 2015
What made it all so difficult for my brother, sister and me was that blurry, blurry line between work of art and life.
A Quiet Place came as a sequel of sorts to my father Leonard Bernstein’s 1951 opera, Trouble in Tahiti. T in T, as we call it, was my father’s processing of his own parents’ unhappy marriage. By the time I was old enough to notice, my grandparents seemed to me like a pretty mellow elderly couple. But my father had recounted growing up in an atmosphere of dinner-table acrimony, squabbles over money, icy silences. The names of the T in T couple were originally Sam and Jennie — his parents’ names. Later, he changed Jennie to Dinah — his grandmother’s name. I wonder what his parents thought of T in T; no record exists of their reaction.
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