Leonard Bernstein and His Young People's Concerts [Hardcover]

[Leonard Bernstein and His Young People's Concerts] is a bristlingly well-informed monograph that draws on Bernsteins archives to tell the story of how his Young Peoples Concerts telecasts came to be, and why they have had no true successors.Kopfstein-Penk proves to be a thorough interrogator of both process and product and the personalities involved. She is particularly revealing about the history and development of the concerts and in her examination of the challenges to key participants in meeting the plethora of conflicting cultural, social and political tropes that emerged in the long 1960s. No less dogged is her analysis of the content and reception of the individual programmes, the detail noted with an almost forensic exactitude. The result is a remarkable document of a remarkable series of documents and an invaluable addition to our deeper understanding of the multi-faceted Bernstein.If one word can describe Kopfstein-Penks work, it is 'complete.' The book is as much a history as it is a biographical volume on the pedagogical work of Leonard Bernstein. She provides hundreds of footnotes and eight appendices and leaves no stone unturned to tell the story of the Young Peoples Concerts.[The author] presents [Bernstein] to us as honestly and in as much detail as is humanly possible.As this well-researched volume reveals, Bernsteins specific pedagogical contributions through the medium of television show how Bernstein engaged classical music as a tool for widespread pleasure, social change, and global unity. At once a biography of Bernstein and of the Young Peoples Concerts, Kopfstein-Penks book uses analysis of the concerts and the musical performances within them to shine new light on Bernsteins life and career. The resulting dialogue...is fascinating and thought-provoking.Alicia Kopfstein-Penk has written a thrilling and vivid account of the element in Leonard Bernstein's work that touched more Americans than anything else he did: the musical educationlÒ