Leonard Bernstein

Called in at a few hours' notice to replace an indisposed Bruno Walter with the New York Philharmonic in November 1943, Leonard Bernstein became widely known through the concert — the concert was broadcast, and the story was on the front page next morning. Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1918, he studied at Harvard, the Curtis Institute and the Berkshire Music Center, where he worked with Serge Koussevitzky. He was music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1958 for eleven years, promoted the music of Mahler, programmed American composers persistently, and in the televised Young People's Concerts explained sonata form and tonality to a television audience. His compositions include West Side Story, Candide and On the Town alongside three symphonies, the Serenade after Plato's Symposium, Chichester Psalms and the theatre piece Mass. He died in 1990. Born Louis, he took the name Leonard officially, and studied conducting with Fritz Reiner and was mentored by Dimitri Mitropoulos, whom he went on to succeed in New York. His first symphony, Jeremiah, won the New York Music Critics Circle award in 1944; he made his European debut at the Prague Spring Festival in 1946, became in 1953 the first American to conduct at La Scala, and gave the premiere of Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie. He recorded Mahler symphony cycles for Columbia and Deutsche Grammophon and won Grammy, Emmy and Tony awards as well as the Praemium Imperiale in 1990.