Thread by @dean_frey

Remembering Leonard Bernstein on his birthday 🎂
📷 Gordon Parks, 1955
"There had never been a communicator about music with anywhere near his brilliance, humor, energy, reach and importance."
- Zachary Woolfe
Seems like his 2018 Centennial was just yesterday!

Coffee with Lenny on his birthday ☕️
That's Joe McNally's 1986 photo of Bernstein at Springate, his Fairfield, Connecticut home.

Leonard Bernstein by Arnold Newman, 1968
@smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
"In terms of conducting technique, he would offer tips. He used to say, 'Don’t imitate me — but do it like this'."
- Marin Alsop

Leonard Bernstein by Don Hunstein, 1958
"Outwardly, Bernstein has much of the actor about him. The bones of his face are arranged so theatrically that in shifting light he gives the impression, without moving a muscle, of being an entire cast of characters."
- Robert Rice

Leonard Bernstein outside the National Theatre in Washington DC, at the August 19, 1957 out-of-town opening
📷 Robert H. Phillips
@NYPL digital collection
"The score to West Side Story is a war zone of impetuous cross-rhythms."
- Jesse Green

Leonard Bernstein by Irving Penn, for Vogue, 1947
Even before he was named Music Director of the @NYPhil the drama critic Harold Clurman said: "Lenny is hopelessly fated for success."

Leonard Bernstein by Gordon Parks, 1956
His @NYTimes obituary quotes "an acquaintance":
"There is nothing Lenny can't do supremely well, if he doesn't try too hard."

Mario Dondero
Maria Callas, Luchino Visconti & Leonard Bernstein during the rehearsals of Bellini's La Sonnambula at La Scala, 1955

Another Mario Dondero shot of Maria Callas, Luchino Visconti & Leonard Bernstein in Milan in 1955. Lenny nearly holds his own, charisma-wise; a tough job when Callas is in the room!

Leonard Bernstein flanked by two of his mentors: Aaron Copland & Serge Koussevitzky
Photo: Ruth Orkin, Tanglewood, 1940

Celebrating Leonard Bernstein on his birthday.
With Virgil Thompson, Walter Piston, Aaron Copland & William Schuman
Photo: Bruce Davidson, 1970
@metmuseum

From Eugene Smith's 1951 "Recording Artists" photo-essay for Life Magazine, Leonard Bernstein with Marc Blitzstein. Blitzstein once said, "We are almost telepathically close. Sometimes we compose startlingly similar music on the same day, without seeing each other.”

Leonard Bernstein by Abbas, Paris, 1986
"Tallulah Bankhead once watched Bernstein conduct a Tanglewood rehearsal & said to him in her husky baritone: 'Darling, I have gone mad over your back muscles. You must come & have dinner with me'."
- Donal Henahan

Leonard Bernstein's final concert with @BostonSymphony
📷 Kristina Jentzsch
"Those who had seen & heard Bernstein perform innumerable times over the years will never forget the sovereign authority of that interpretation, grave & noble, yet passionate, as well."
- John Rockwell

Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, & Adolph Green in rehearsal for On the Town, 1943.
@NYPL Digital Collections
"Its omnivorous musical style embodies the Bernstein ethos at its most daring and youthful."
- Joshua Barone

Alfred Eisenstaedt
Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins & Leonard Bernstein work on West Side Story, 1956
"No one writing a musical has ever used rhythm as effectively as he did, to let us hear the human heart just as it’s leaping forward, just as it’s about to burst."
- Jesse Green

Leonard Bernstein by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1960
"Yes, all conductors have highly personal characteristics, but has there ever been one as theatrical, as showy, as hammy as he was? Or as exciting, as persuasive, as dedicated?"
- Robert Gottlieb

Leonard Bernstein rehearses Carmen with Marilyn Horne at Lincoln Center
@MetOpera
📷 Burt Glinn, 1972

In New York in the 1960s the Three Bs of Classical Music were Leonard Bernstein, George Balanchine & Rudolph Bing.
Photo: Michael Rougier, Lincoln Centre, 1966

I don't believe Philippe Halsman got a #Jump shot with Leonard Bernstein, but no matter: here's Gjon Mili's great photo of Lenny up in the air.

Leonard Bernstein by David Attie, 1959
"I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it, studying it or thinking about it. And all this is quite apart from my professional role as a musician."