Featured Work
Chichester Psalms (1965)
In early December 1963, Bernstein received a letter from the Very Reverend Walter Hussey, Dean of the Cathedral of Chichester in Sussex, England, requesting a piece for the Cathedral’s 1965 music festival: “The Chichester Organist and Choirmaster, John Birch, and I, are very anxious to have written some piece of music which the combined choirs could sing at the Festival to be held in Chichester in August, 1965, and we wondered if you would be willing to write something for us."
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The Leonard Bernstein Office (LBO) sustains and strengthens Leonard Bernstein’s legacy by inspiring global engagement with his work as a composer, conductor, educator, and humanitarian. Through licensing, promotion, music editing, and publishing, the LBO strives to communicate his lifelong devotion to the transformative power and joy of music.
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Thus Spake Leonard Bernstein:
"The conductor must not only make his orchestra play - he must make them want to play. He must exalt them, lift them, start their adrenaline pouring, either by pleading or demanding or raging. But however he does it, he must make them love the music as he loves it. It is not so much a matter of imposing his will on them like a dictator; it is more like projecting his feelings around so that they reach the last player in the 2nd violin section. And when this happens - when everybody shares his feelings, when 100 musicians are sharing the same feelings, exactly, simultaneously, responding as one to each rise and fall of the music, to each point of arrival and departure, to when all that is happening then there is a human identity of feeling that has no equal elsewhere."
-Leonard Bernstein ("Omnibus Presents: The Art of Conducting," December 4, 1955)