Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
DVD Layers: 1
DVD Sides: 1
EAN: 9781572523760
Format: Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
ISBN: 6305154996
Label: Winstar
Languages: EnglishOriginal LanguageDolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Manufacturer: Winstar
Number Of Items: 1
Picture Format: Academy Ratio
Publisher: Winstar
Release Date: November 24, 1998
Running Time: 117 minutes
Studio: Winstar
Theatrical Release Date: 1998

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Editorial Review:

Amazon.com:
Originally aired on PBS's American Masters series, this evocative biography of the American composer, conductor, and de facto musical evangelist Leonard Bernstein offers a compelling balance of musical scholarship and personal insight. It's a fitting approach to the brilliant--and emotional--life and art of Bernstein, who elevated Broadway musical theater, demystified and democratized classical music for two generations of American children, and brought a true New Yorker's vigor and directness to his conducting.

Writer-director Susan Lacy establishes the film's sympathetic tone in its opening shots of Bernstein's funeral cortege as it passed along Manhattan streets in 1990. Underscoring the footage is the elegiac second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, the final piece conducted by Bernstein at his final performance months earlier at Tanglewood. Scenes from that last concert (and a return to that slow, funereal march) are the inevitable conclusion of Lacy's film, which finds ample drama over the course of approximately two hours.

Lacy traces the arc of Bernstein's career from his earliest triumphs as a young conductor through his Broadway successes (culminating in West Side Story), his historic network television outreach, the frustrations encountered over his "serious" compositions (often derided, ultimately vindicated), and his autumnal work abroad conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. Bernstein's private demons--anguish over the tradeoff between a conductor's glory and a composer's productivity, the ridicule invited by his impassioned political activism, the conflict between his devotion to his family and his bisexuality, bouts of depression suffered in his later years--are addressed as well.

Excellent archival footage and a literate script are enhanced by interviews with his brother and children; collaborators including Jerome Robbins, Isaac Stern, and Stephen Sondheim; and conductors including John Mauceri, Seiji Ozawa, and Michael Tilson Thomas. --Sam Sutherland




Rating: - just FINE!
Reviewer Hadrian12's spotlight review says perfectly everything to say about this film. Thanks for that.

I can think of no more compelling 20th c. musician. Everything about Reaching for the Note is about the living lamp that is Bernstein's work, about the music he became; always breathing life, whatever his job. The film spends generous time with West Side Story, with a remarkable stretch of essential comments by Sondheim, Carol Lawrence, &Arthur Larents interspersing a cache of unbelievable ... Read More

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Rating: - A Caped Prima Donna, but he Loved Music, and it Shows!
Using interviews with his son and daughters, his brother, the writers, choreographers, and conductors he worked with, and many of his friends, and clips of his rehearsals and performances, we see the life of a very talented, but troubled genius.

His personal life was torn between wanting to be a family man and good father, versus his strong attraction to the gay lifestyle. His musical life was likewise pulled in several directions: he wanted to be a conductor, composer, and a teacher.
... Read More

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Rating: - Absolute BERNSTEIN!
It has been said many times that music is the universal language. While the truth of this statement is self-evident, occasionally even universal languages require translators. For that, great men such as Leonard Bernstein have stepped to the fore to assist the rest of us in understanding what is perhaps man's single greatest art form.

This is a magnificent documentary of the life of this incredible individual. Leonard Bernstein can be called the Carl Sagan of classical music. What the Cornell ... Read More

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Rating: - Good but a little white-washed
This PBS documentary is loaded with clips from Lenny's long career, and captures many of his great moments on film. There are also the requisite interviews with people fawning over him. No mention of the extremely negative (often deservedly so) reviews he got in his early days at the helm of the NYPO, or the sordid story of how he wrestled the top job there away from Dmitri Mitropoulos by "outing" him when he himself was flagrantly bisexual. What he did to his wife, emotionally, in her final years, is only briefly ... Read More

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Rating: - "Lenny in Retrospect"
Leonard Bernstein is perhaps one of the greatest men to stand on any podium, anywhere in the world. One gets a sense of how much larger than life he was through watching this video. The video provides a poignant look into his family life, and how much of his work was influenced by his personal life. Like any man Bernstein had to grapple with outward, and inner personal turmoil which is highlighted in this video. The Chichester Psalms allowed him to get further in touch with his Jewish roots, something that ... Read More

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