Bernstein on Conducting and Prelude, Fugue & Riffs

A Year of Bernstein — A 100th-Birthday Celebration

Join us as we celebrate Leonard Bernstein’s 100th Birthday with a yearlong, 12-lecture series exploring his extraordinary legacy as a composer of theater and concert music, a conductor and a teacher.

Leonard Bernstein was the first musician to harness the power of television in the service of teaching the broad public music appreciation, appearing seven times during the mid-to-late 1950’s on the most distinguished program of the era, Omnibus. This lecture explores and builds from his brilliant program, The Art of Conducting, which was broadcast live on December 4, 1955 as part of the CBS program Omnibus, and to this day remains the finest exploration of what it is a conductor actually does. The program, and our lecture, concludes with a thrilling performance of one of Bernstein’s greatest pieces of symphonic jazz, Prelude, Fugue and Riffs.