Leonard Bernstein
04/16/2021
“The last great father-figure of Western music” was how Leonard Bernstein eulogized Igor Stravinsky. The composer’s works, he asserted, “sum up and embrace all of music itself – from primitive folk art to highly sophisticated serialism, from rarefied church music to outspoken jazz.” Bernstein’s Stravinsky performances include some of his most indelible interpretations, among them the celebrated recording of "Le Sacre du printemps" with the New York Philharmonic in 1958 that elicited the composer’s famous reaction: “Wow!” This recording, Classics Today wrote just a few years ago, still has “an excitement, spontaneity, and primal fury that no other version quite matches.”