Poolside with Lenny

Recent reading has included the newly published Dinner with Lenny, a full-length transcript of Leonard Bernstein’s last major interview which was given to Jonathan Cott in 1989 and originally intended for publication in in Rolling Stone magazine. Their discussion goes where today’s classical music revisionists dare not go and at one point the musician and Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan is quoted in the context of Bernstein’s Mahler interpretations. There is more wisdom in one page of Dinner with Lenny than in the entire oeuvre of today’s self-styled cultural commentators and if Universal Music’s Max Hole and BBC Radio 3’s Roger Wright would but take the time to read it the world would be a slightly better place. My own brush with what Jonathan Cott tactfully describes as the polyamorous Lenny is recounted in Simply chic symphonies?.

Also on Facebook and Twitter. Dinner with Lenny was borrowed from the Second Air Division memorial Library, Norwich and my thanks go to Henry Tevelin who sponsored the acquisition of the volume thereby allowing me to share it with readers. Header photo is © On An Overgrown Path 2013. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s)