Avshalomov/Bernstein 1: Introduction

Posted on January 28, 2019

Bernstein: 1918-1990

Avshalomov: 1919-2013

Leonard Bernstein and Jacob Avshalomov: one shot like a rocket into the international classical music stratosphere; the other wound his way through the world and built his reputation year by year.  A year apart in age, both were part of the legendary post-WWII mid-twentieth-century American composers’ “circuit,” as Avshalomov put it.  Both their similarities and their differences informed their different life-trajectories, the decisions they made at crucial points, and ultimately the legacies they left us.  In this multi-entry blog exploring Bernstein’s Jeremiah Symphony and Avshalomov’s tone poem The Taking of T’ung Kuan, we’ll begin with biographical aspects and move on after that to the works themselves.

The similarities:

—Both composers were of Russian-Jewish heritage, and both their fathers emigrated from Russia (taking diametrically different routes out) because of the threat of persecution of Jewish males via discriminatory compulsory military service;

—both had deep, troubled relationships with their fathers, who also exerted significant, although very different, influences on their development and career choice;

—both conducted professionally for many years as well as became national award-winning composers, and both experienced the tension of preferring to be known as composers but finding themselves in demand as conductors;

—both wrote significant vocal as well as instrumental works;

—both were involved with Tanglewood (although Bernstein was foundational to the festival);

—both had many influential music friends in common, including Aaron Copland and clarinetist/CBS executive/Director of Tisch School of the Arts David Oppenheim (more on him later);

—both were famously committed to the education of young people, from audience members to future professionals; Avshalomov through his decades of leadership of PYP and Bernstein through his creation of the Young People’s concerts (and both of them taught at Tanglewood as well);

—finally, the pieces PYP is performing on this program are the first major landmark symphonic compositions for each of them.  Both concern cataclysmic, highly dramatic events, were written when they were both just 24—Bernstein’s in 1942, and Avshalomov’s in 1943—and their fathers play a pivotal role in each (more on that later).

NEXT: Bernstein’s early years

Carolyn Talarr, Community Programs Coordinator