By Sebastian Spreng, Visual Artist and Classical Music Writer

There’s a famous moment in one of the equally famous Young People’s Concerts of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra that Leonard Bernstein created and conducted between 1958 and 1972. In one of those 53 televised concerts that provided a music education to more than one generation, as he sat at the piano and explained Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, the ineffable “Lenny” played, hummed, sang and finally shouted, “I want it, I want it… I WANT IT!” With that phrase he defined in its totality the spirit of the work, leaving an indelible mark on the audience. For those young people, now concert-hall veterans, the Fourth will always evoke that desperate cry that is the essence of Tchaikovsky: “I WANT IT.”

If Bernstein’s remarkable way of transmitting knowledge made history, his daughter Jamie came close to that benchmark during the concert Expressing the Inexpressible, part of the New World Symphony’s Encounters series. The evening was devoted to Richard Strauss and his tone poem Death and Transfiguration, in which the protagonist reflects on his life as he lies on his deathbed. Proving that the apple doesn’t fall from the tree, Ms. Bernstein hummed the work’s leitmotif, associating it with the line “Once, I had such a life” and through several transformations – from “How close I am to dying” to “Marching into my life” – conveying Strauss’s alternating emotions of nostalgia for his past, and terror of the unknown hovering just ahead while illustrating the complexities of programmatic music.

Over the years and as an annual guest of the American Orchestral Academy, Jamie Bernstein has polished the art of explaining music and making it accessible to the beginner, achieving on this occasion exemplary effectiveness. A worthy heir to the Bernstein Way, she conveyed the who and how of Richard Strauss and revealed that she herself had had to undergo a metamorphosis of sorts in order to accept the Bavarian composer’s work, moving from slight annoyance to complete admiration. In fact, few compositions are as intrinsically Straussian as Death and Transfiguration. Her account of Strauss’s life, composing technique and his own deathbed experience were accompanied by audiovisual material that eschewed neither Wagner nor Bugs Bunny singing Wagner, to the amazement and delight of an audience discovering that perhaps classical music was not the kind of affair they’d feared it was.

Responding to the attentive Joshua Gersen’s leadership, the orchestra performed with tremendous skill, first in the musical illustrations and then in the complete tone poem, concluding the evening with the required grandiosity. The hour and several minutes the presentation lasted were punctuated by enthusiastic response on the part of a diverse audience, made up of both veteran music buffs and many teenagers for whom Bernstein’s explanation made the tone poem (a half hour long) fly by. It was a clear example of how the educational approach devised by Leonard Bernstein, and continued by successors such as Michael Tilson Thomas, bears immediate and practical fruits. Practiced to perfection by Bernstein’s older daughter, it provides an entertaining and effective way to foster understanding and absorption of each new musical universe – and inspires audiences to say to themselves, “I want it!”

Jamie Bernstein