Inside an insomniac's brain
Pasatiempo
Phillip Lutz | For The New Mexican, March 3, 2023
On a blustery February afternoon, the late Aaron Copland’s rustic home seemed, upon entering, a ghostly affair. Isolated amid the woods of rural Cortlandt Manor, New York, the home, now a National Historic Landmark, was strangely quiet save for the faint rustle of dry leaves swirling outside the windows.
But inside the sitting room, the home came alive. While the room was empty, a 1980s-vintage photo of Copland embracing a beaming Leonard Bernstein dominated a wall — evoking the loud voices and lusty laughs that marked the marathon sessions these two cultural icons often held hashing out scores.
“They must have had to put their heads together innumerable times late into the night,” says Jamie Bernstein, Leonard’s eldest child.
Those times, and many like them that Leonard enjoyed with a rarified circle of friends, family, and colleagues, will be recalled when Jamie, as narrator, hosts pianists Michael Boriskin and John Musto and soprano Amy Burton at the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Tuesday, March 7, for Late Night With Leonard Bernstein.
The show, which has been performed in cities throughout the United States since its premiere in 2010 at Lincoln Center’s Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse in New York, “purports,” Jamie says, “to be a guided tour inside my father’s insomniac brain. It’s true that my father could never sleep, and he had this motor he could not turn off. And so the late hours of the night were his liveliest hours of the day.”
Speaking by video conference from the unpretentious apartment she has long occupied in New York City, Jamie, who at 70 is just two years shy of her father’s age at his death in 1990, is a highly engaging figure in her own right — theatrical in her manner, perceptive in her analysis, and precise in her descriptions of her father’s nocturnal activities.