An Excerpt From

Working With Bernstein

By Jack Gottlieb

Overheard It was my job to wake the Maestro up and get him on time to whatever hall he was scheduled. Sometimes, especially for morning rehearsals, it could be a struggle, for LB could offer resistance with the best of them. The few times we were late—happily, never seriously so—one guess as to who got the blame. Various of my successors adopted different methods. Richard Nelson placed a warm damp washcloth on his forehead. Charlie Harmon, when they were in Vienna, ordered morning coffee that came with a bowl of whipped cream, and proceeded to dip Maestro’s hand into the Schlag. Or Charlie would sit down at the piano and play something deliberately bad to rouse the man. These tactics were especially pressing since Viennese concerts on Sundays began at 11 a.m. Craig Urquhart and Michael Barrett once had to drag him into a cold shower. I never had to resort to such extreme measures, probably because he was younger and could get going more easily in those days. Once he was roused, it was my or his practice to turn on the radio to station WQXR, New York City’s classical music radio station. Of course, most of the time he knew the pieces that were playing, but not always. On such exceptional occasions, we would play a guessing game. Here are three such occurrences. Number one: Neither of us knew the work, but I picked a relatively obscure Russian composer, more as a gag than anything else, and asserted: “Oh, that’s by Nikolai Medtner.” The piece was over and Bingo! it was identified as Medtner’s. LB turned to me, “How did you know that?” Secretly gloating at my supposed vast erudition, I calmly responded, “Well, of course I do, and I’m surprised that you, of all people, don’t.” Number two: A modernist work was playing, and again, neither of us recognized it and could not even make a guess. Competition and composition over, we heard from the announcer: “You have just heard Elliott Carter’s Concerto for Orchestra with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.” Let that sink in and speak for itself. The work, inspired by Saint-John Perse verse, was premiered on 2 February 1970 and recorded a week later. Number three was a more severe matter. In 1985 he heard a Scarlatti sonata, but the artist was not announced. He was frustrated, and wanted to know the name of the pianist, instructing me to find out. I called the station, and they said there was no such sonata playing at that hour, which I reported back. The Maestro was indignant: “Don’t tell me that; I heard it, and I want to know who it is.” More calls and more stonewalling. Finally, it was discovered that it had been played as a last-minute replacement for something else that had been scheduled, and not written down on the air-time log. The pianist was an unknown Polish artist, Marek Drewnowski. When Drewnowski, in Rome at the time, got a phone call from Harry Kraut, and heard that LB was interested in him, the startled artist at first believed it to be a prank; but soon enough was convinced. He was asked to perform the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 at Tanglewood, a piece he had never played in public before, although he professed to know it. His performance was not exactly stellar, and I subsequently wondered why LB was so insistent that the BSO hire him. Could it have partly been due to our doubting his word when trying to find solve the mystery? There are two other minor errors connected to this affair. In an interview, Drewnowski claimed that Bernstein had heard him on a car radio, and John Rockwell, reviewing the concert in the New York Times, said the radio station was WNCN. A curious corollary to all this: As related by Daryl Bornstein, one day in New York City, LB got into the passenger front seat of a car. The radio was playing a classical piece of music. The Maestro reached over and turned it off, saying, “There’s too much music in the world.”