Jamie as Mozart the kid, hugging Julia postconcert.
If someone had told me, back in LA in the early 1980s as I strove to be a rock star, that twenty-five years later I’d be a mother of two, dancing around on the stage of Carnegie Hall dressed as a twelve-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, I’d have thought that person was smoking something potent indeed.
23
The Venezuela Connection
Scrolling idly through my Facebook feed, I came across a link to a YouTube video showing a very young conductor with unruly black curls leading some Latin American youth orchestra in the good old Mambo from West Side Story. I thought: This might be cute to watch for fifteen seconds or so . . . and I clicked on the “play” arrow.
I knew nothing about what I was looking at. These girls and boys looked very young, and they were playing the Mambo as if they were on fire. They were also laughing, dancing in place, twirling their instruments, all without dropping a note. They were wildly virtuosic, all of them—and that young, curly-headed conductor drove them forward in rare style. I found myself laughing, then crying—and certainly not clicking away after fifteen seconds. Who were these kids? Why the hell could they play like that? I had never before seen such a joyous spirit pouring out of musicians.
Then I realized: of course I had seen that joyous spirit before. This was precisely the same energy that came surging out of my father when he conducted. I had simply never seen it coming out of an entire orchestra. Maybe this was why I’d found myself in tears as I watched: these very young musicians, ablaze in their own playing—it was the embodiment of everything Daddy had ever meant. I was overcome with my longing to share that video with him.
As I watched Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela for that very first time, on a screen-within-a-screen smaller than the palm of my hand, something seismic happened inside me.
I felt compelled to find out more about those kids—in a way, so as to tell my father all about them. I learned that in the 1970s, a young Venezuelan musician-economist, José Antonio Abreu, developed the idea that a youth orchestra program could provide a safe after-school haven for children living in impoverished, dangerous neighborhoods. Maestro Abreu soon saw that a youth orchestra provided far more than safety; it was, in fact, a template for a successful community. This nurturing daily environment was providing those kids with patience, empathy, self-confidence, focus—the crucial inner resources that would help them pursue whatever they wanted to do with their lives later on. The fact that they were becoming excellent musicians was almost a by-product of what was primarily a social-rescue program.
The program was called El Sistema. By the time I watched that YouTube video, hundreds of thousands of kids across Venezuela were spending their after-school hours learning to play Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mahler. The orchestra I saw on the video was El Sistema’s all-star team, now touring the world and taking audience after audience by storm.
I had to admit, it sounded way too good to be true. But if it was true, I had to know more about it. I had to see it—to report about it in my head to Daddy. So I organized a trip to Caracas, Venezuela, with three friends.
Our guides, Norma and Rodrigo, took us to visit half a dozen Sistema sites, or núcleos, in the Caracas area. As our van slogged through the endless traffic on the first morning, I fretted: What if El Sistema turned out to be some sort of grimly rigid, Soviet-style experiment?
Well, it wasn’t remotely Soviet—or even, for that matter, particularly systematic. The núcleos were noisy, chaotic places, bubbling over with the kids’ raucous energy. Hundreds of them would cram into undersized, underventilated rehearsal spaces, playing Tchaikovsky and Mahler with a mad exuberance, the string players somehow managing not to poke one another’s eyes out with their bows.
The teachers radiated a patient enthusiasm. Many of them had come up through El Sistema themselves; they told us how music had rescued them from the limited options of their neighborhood streets: the gangs, the drugs, the violence. (Maestro Abreu memorably said: “A child who holds a violin will never pick up a gun.”)
And everything was happening in Spanish!—my mother’s language, the comforting syllables of my earliest childhood. Conversing with the kids, the parents, the Sistema staff, the teachers, I was overcome with a deep sense of wholeness—even though Venezuelan Spanish was so fast and slurred that I missed whole chunks of what people were saying.
I was often fighting back tears in Caracas. Here was a program that synthesized my father’s two most heartfelt objectives: sharing the joy of music with young people and making the world a better place. All I could think of was: If Daddy could see this, he would plotz.
* * *
When I learned that Gustavo would be coming to New York to conduct my father’s former orchestra, I asked the Philharmonic if I could throw Gustavo and his wife, Eloisa, a party. Who was this new me that called the New York Philharmonic brass on the phone? But to my astonishment, the answer was yes; the party was on. As the festivities wound down, Gustavo mentioned to me that he liked dancing: my kind of guy! I organized the posse, and about a dozen of us went straight from the Dome to a gay-lesbian Latino club I knew, on a grimy street behind the Port Authority Bus Terminal. We caroused until four in the morning. Gustavo, like my father, was most assuredly a man with a motor.
The next day, Gustavo visited the Philharmonic Archives, where he pored over Bernstein’s conducting scores, which now reside there. The archivist in chief, Barbara Haws, showed Gustavo a baton of Daddy’s; Barbara told me, “When he picked it up, it literally seemed to dance on his fingertips!” She invited Gustavo to use the baton in his final concert with the Philharmonic that weekend. During the last bars of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, a particularly vigorous motion caused the baton to snap in half. Gustavo was chagrined, but everyone else loved the incident; after all, a baton used by Lenny, then broken by Gustavo, was a perfect case of value added. Barbara Haws carefully preserves the baton’s two pieces at the Philharmonic Archives.
Gustavo went on to conduct all the LB symphonic works in the following years, and my siblings and I attended many of the concerts. Since our father’s death, we’d often experienced a what-is-wrong-with-this-picture sensation whenever we saw someone else on the podium. But watching Gustavo conduct was a different, even eerie experience. That energy on the podium, so similar to Daddy’s; the unbridled physicality, the tenderness combined with the momentum of a runaway locomotive, all of it carefully calibrated to every nuance of the music . . . it felt so familiar. As I watched Gustavo, I would at one moment feel maternal about this twenty-six-year-old whiz kid; in the next, I would feel as close and proud as a sister; and the moment after that—I couldn’t help making the parallel—I would even feel like his daughter, though I was twice Gustavo’s age. I kept thinking about how, if my father were alive to see Gustavo in action, he would have enfolded the young conductor in his arms and fractured several ribs with the gusto of his embrace.
Word came from Caracas that I was invited to present The Bernstein Beat—en español!—with the city’s premier high-school-age Sistema ensemble. I’d never in my life been so excited about a gig.
The concert went beautifully, with only one glitch—right at the beginning. For some reason the clarinet player, who had never had this trouble before, added one extra note to his five repeated notes at the opening of the “Times Square” music from On the Town, thereby putting himself one beat behind the conductor. This caused some of the players to stay back with him, while others barreled forward with the conductor—creating what musicians refer to as a train wreck. Maestro Dietrich Paredes stopped the orchestra, waited for the clarinet player to collect himself, then started the piece over. The clarinet player did it again: extra note, another train wreck. Maestro Dietrich stopped the orchestra yet again. The hall was engulfed in a sickening silence. The concert began a third time. And the clarinet player did it again; his brain had gotten stuck. It happens. This time, Maestr
o Dietrich just kept everyone going, and after fourteen very shaky bars, things eventually righted themselves. Everything was perfect after that. But it was a tough start for one and all—especially for the clarinet player, who never raised his head again and fled offstage the instant the last note of the concert was played. Between each of our final bows, Maestro Dietrich was frantically asking backstage: “¿Dónde está Antonio? ¿Dónde está Antonio?” But Antonio was gone.
After the concert, there was a lunch for us in a hotel dining room. Suddenly the teenage musicians at the long table burst into whoops and applause: Antonio the clarinet player had just been dragged in by two orchestra chums. The young musicians all jumped up from the table and surrounded Antonio with hugs, backslaps, hair ruffling, words of encouragement. He covered his face in embarrassment, but he couldn’t resist his friends; soon he was smiling and returning their hugs.
I watched all this with my mouth open; I knew I was witnessing the essence of El Sistema. A staff member said: “You see? We don’t build musicians; we build human beings.”
* * *
On New Year’s Day 2010, my friend Elizabeth Kling and I were talking about El Sistema, and how exciting it was to see it becoming a global movement. Elizabeth suddenly said: “I know what: Let’s make a film! Let’s make a documentary about El Sistema coming to the United States!” “Okay!” I said, the way one does during a New Year’s Day conversation with a friend.
But then we actually went and did it.
First we followed Stanford Thompson, an African American trumpet player from Atlanta, as he started his own Sistema-inspired “núcleo” in West Philadelphia. Elizabeth and I had our cameras rolling on day one of the Play On, Philly! program, and we returned there regularly for the better part of two years. We focused on two kids: Raven, an excitable fifth grader who took on the violin, and seventh grader Zebadiah, quiet and quirky behind his dreadlocks, learning to play the viola.
In our third year of filming, we went to Harlem and followed a whole new kid: eleven-year-old Mohamed, who played the trombone in the Harmony Program. Anne Fitzgibbon had launched her program after spending two years observing El Sistema in Venezuela, where even getting kidnapped hadn’t dimmed her enthusiasm.
Elizabeth was an experienced film editor and producer, but making a documentary presented its own unique set of challenges—and of course I knew nothing at all. We were in so far over our heads, I’m still amazed that we persevered. The logistics, the expenses, the crises, the crew, the new crew, the new crises . . . If I’d had any inkling of what I was getting into, I never would have taken on the project. Sometimes ignorance can be a blessing.
When Elizabeth brought in award-winning editor Jonathan Oppenheim, she had no idea that long ago on Martha’s Vineyard, Judy Holliday (who had been a member of the Revuers with Betty and Adolph) had brought over her six-year-old son Jonathan to play with me, and that Jonathan’s father, David Oppenheim, had been my father’s close friend (and lover). This serendipitous family connection fit right in with my urge to show El Sistema to Daddy—and after all, this film was my ultimate expression of that urge.
Jonathan took us a long way, but we ran out of money—despite a harrowing but ultimately successful Kickstarter campaign. We had to let Jonathan go, though the editing was still far from complete. Elizabeth and I talked about giving up.
Then, a miracle. I’d sent a rough cut of the film to my personally appointed godfather, Mike Nichols. Mike called me to say that he and his wife, Diane Sawyer, had watched the film the night before and loved it. How could he help? How about $50,000?
Mike had swept in like the proverbial shining knight and saved our film. He’d been so generous to my whole family as we were growing up; he’d been so kind and thoughtful during Mummy’s illness—plus, he could even carve a roast—and now he was doing me such an enormous favor, I could hardly process it.
The premiere of Crescendo: The Power of Music at the Philadelphia Film Festival was immediately followed by a live performance featuring a dozen kids from the Play On, Philly! program—including our two local protagonists, Raven and Zebadiah. The crowd went nuts. The film won two prizes straight out of the gate, and won more later on. Netflix bought it, too.
My private joke about the title is that it gave me a permanent opportunity to rant about the universal misuse of the word “crescendo,” as in: “The controversy rose to a deafening crescendo.” The word, which means “growing” in Italian, is a musical indication for a gradual increase in volume. I strongly suspect the problem derives from the word sounding so much like cymbals making a crash at the end-o . . . Anyway, now I have a built-in excuse to be a perennial corrector—and, my siblings would add, a perennial nuisance. But I like to think my father, ever the grammatical stickler himself, would have enjoyed the finger wagging embedded in my title.
Two months after the opening in Philadelphia, Elizabeth and I organized a private screening of our film at Symphony Space in New York, specially choosing a date that fit Mike Nichols’s busy schedule. We couldn’t wait to thank him, profusely and in person, for saving our film from perdition. But a week before the screening, Mike died suddenly. No one was prepared. He’d been frail but full of energy, with many projects in the works. It was a sickening, knee-buckling shock to lose him.
We wound up dedicating our film to Mike, but I’ll be sad for the rest of my days that I didn’t get to thank him, hug him, love him enough for everything he did. I felt I’d lost a father all over again.
24
Lately
Harry Kraut spent more and more time down in Key West. His health was poor; he was the last of the chain-smokers. One evening as he left a restaurant, Harry fell on the steps and hit his head. He never awoke, and died three weeks later. It was a sad, lonely end to an eventful, populous life. But after a bit of time had elapsed, my siblings and I came to realize it was easier in Harry’s absence to run what was now called the Leonard Bernstein Office. We weren’t quite such “winnies” anymore. Maybe we were even grownups, finally. Nina was using her chef’s expertise to work with high school students in tough urban neighborhoods, helping them discover and prepare affordable, nutritious food. Nina was . . . a teacher. As for Alexander, he had helped the BETA Fund evolve into a meticulously devised educational model called Artful Learning, which was successfully running in elementary and secondary schools all around the country. Alexander, too, was an educator. And here I was, writing and presenting educational concerts all over the world. Teaching turned out to be the apple that fell, all three times, close to the Daddy tree.
As for the Mummy tree, here was the surprise: despite both Alexander and Nina having studied acting, the one who couldn’t resist the stage—the indisputable ham of the family—turned out to be their pesky older sister.
It’s one of life’s mysteries that in some families of prominent musicians, the children gravitate effortlessly to music. Rudolf Serkin’s son Peter became a celebrated pianist, both of Isaac Stern’s sons are conductors, and there are countless other examples—but ours was not such a family. All three of us went in other directions, yet we’re deeply, even neurologically tethered to music. Nina, like our mother, is continually tapping out a complex rhythm with her fingers. Alexander does this, too—adding contrapuntal muscle contractions with his hips and knees. On the street, I make rhythm and bass lines to my walking tempo by clicking my fingernails and sliding my teeth against each other. Nina, too, plays tunes with her teeth. And all three of us are perpetually plagued by “earworms”: bits of music that play over and over in our heads, sometimes for days—anything from a Tchaikovsky snippet to a tune from Candide—or, just as likely, a ghastly TV ad jingle. We’re a three-piece band of musical tics. There’s but a whisper of difference, it would appear, between a Line of Genius on a forehead and a mild case of OCD.
Around 2008, my concert narrating got an enormous boost from my father’s colleague and my friend Michael Tilson Thomas. Since our long-ago hiking days in the Southwest, Mi
chael had become a very important maestro, leading the San Francisco Symphony, as well as founding an orchestral academy, the New World Symphony, in Miami.
I was in the middle of my filmmaking when Michael called me with a proposition: How would I like to design and present educational concerts for adults with the New World Symphony? I would research and write the scripts, then come down to Miami Beach twice a year and narrate the concerts with the orchestra and its young conducting fellow.
I almost turned the job down. It sounded frighteningly demanding—and besides, I was making a movie. But who could say no to MTT? Not me.
First, there was the research part, which I always overdid; that was part of the fun. Then it became a writing assignment: squeezing all that excess information down into a coherent tincture. Then came the dessert: traveling to Miami Beach in the Florida-friendly months of November and February; rehearsing with the brilliant young orchestra in their magnificent new Frank Gehry building; and, finally, delivering my narration at the concert while, on an overhead screen, ingeniously devised visuals accompanied my remarks. Each concert was its own unique, nifty concoction. Yes, it was a lot of work. Yes, it was the best job ever.
By now, I’d been at this concert-writing-and-narrating business for a decade. My unorthodox path to knowledge about classical music was starting to add up. In my narrations, I was learning how to select the engaging detail; how to put an audience at ease by mixing historical information with contemporary references; how to project my persona to the very back row, drawing in my listeners as if we were chatting over cocktails. Maybe I was starting to get good at this stuff. Was this a career?
Famous Father Girl Page 29
