The Observer's Benjamin Ivry wrote about Mr. Bernstein:

The festival will kick off Sept. 24, 2008 when Carnegie Hall launches its 2008-09 season with an All-Bernstein Opening Night Gala. The evening will feature Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony as well as performances by Dawn Upshaw, Thomas Hampson and Yo-Yo Ma. Concertgoers can expect to hear selections from Fancy Free, A Quiet Place, On the Town, Wonderful Town, Candide and West Side Story.

More than 30 events will celebrate the life and career of Mr. Bernstein from Sept. 24-Dec. 13, 2008.

More from Playbill:

Chevy Chase says he was asked to have a recurring role on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” but that was before the W.G.A. strike. Recalling his recent debut appearance on the sketch show’s mock-news segment, for which he was apparently paid scale, the Caddyshack actor said he was disappointed by the poor writing. He also blames his poor performance on a standing ovation from the audience. “I didn’t want to overshadow the new kids," he told Fox News, referring to co-anchors Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers, adding: "I was shocked." According to Mr. Chase, 64, who was only on SNL for its first season, famed musical composer Leonard Bernstein nearly hosted an episode during the show’s inaugural year on the air. “The idea of John [Belushi] and Danny [Aykroyd] coming out doing a number from that show cracked us up," Mr. Chase said. But when the comedian and writer Tom Schiller visited Mr. Bernstein backstage, the West Side Story creator got fresh with the wrong guy. “He put his hand on my knee. When we were leaving, he kissed me full-on, on the lips,” Mr. Chase remembered. “I wagged my finger at him and said, ‘No, no, no.’ And that was the last we ever heard from him."

[Gawker]

[DumboNYC]

[OuterB]

[Forbes via Real Deal]

- Tom Acitelli

Yet as a matter of record, Bernstein was born near Boston, and Massachusetts will be laying claim to him from Oct. 12 to 14, during Celebrating Leonard Bernstein, an international conference and performance festival at Harvard University. A scholarly symposium will include subjects like “Boston’s Bernstein: Jewish Identity and Community,” “Bernstein’s Harvard Student Union Productions: In Search of Political Origins” and “Bernstein’s Senior Thesis at Harvard: The Roots of a Lifelong Search to Discover an American Musical Identity.” Concerts at Harvard will feature Bernstein’s neglected early music like his Piano Trio (1937) and Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (1942), as well as works by his childhood mentors like Solomon Braslavsky, who was choir director at Bernstein’s family synagogue in Boston. Will Harvard succeed in co-opting Bernstein as a Bostonian, snatching away New York’s favorite classical-music son?

New CD and DVD releases suggest that neither New York nor Harvard can definitively claim Bernstein; he belongs to the world. Sony Classical has just transferred to CD a 1956 performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony augmented by a compelling lecture about Beethoven’s sketchbooks, delivered by Bernstein in four different languages: English, Yiddish-accented German, pinched French and vibrant, garlicky Italian.

Bernstein valiantly struggled against Babel, reaching out to conquer foreign languages that separated people. In a new DVD from Deutsche Grammophon of a 1990 concert of Mozart’s music, Bernstein delivers an intense chat in more stately and masterful-sounding German than he could manage in the mid-50’s. He points out that he’s conducting Mozart in a church in Waldsassen, Germany, near the Czech border, a location at “the very heart of Europe.” Contemplating a local war memorial makes Bernstein “realize how totally outmoded wars are, how futile and useless it is for anyone to emerge and claim victory …. Wars only serve as a pretext for satisfying greed, an appetite for power [in the original German, Machthunger], and economic growth at other people’s expense.”

Music can be seen in a visibly international context as part of a slew of new DVD’s of Bernstein concert performances released by Kultur International Films Ltd. They include long-unavailable films of performances in Paris, Vienna, Sydney and Tokyo, among other places. In 1970, Bernstein conducted Verdi’s Requiem in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. Before the concert, as the camera pans over the majestic cathedral, Bernstein’s disembodied voice speaks mournfully about the London Blitz, the Holocaust, the assassinations of J.F.K., R.F.K. and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the death in a 1961 plane crash of U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld.

Intertwining music, language and site-specific history was a compulsion for Bernstein from his days at the Boston Latin School (he was class of ’35). It was at Boston Latin, as Jack Gottlieb writes in an editor’s note to Bernstein’s recently reprinted Young People’s Concerts (Amadeus Press), that the young Lenny picked up German, French, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish and Hebrew — in addition to Latin. Most conductors have enough working knowledge of foreign languages to get them through rehearsals overseas. By contrast, Mr. Gottlieb recalls, Bernstein’s New York study was “filled, floor to ceiling, with dictionaries, etymological works, and phrase books of all kinds. His familiarity with literature was almost frightening in its scope; and his passion for unconventional word games, like cutthroat anagrams and convoluted British-magazine crossword puzzles—the harder the better—almost bordered on the religious …. He was intoxicated with words.”

I’ve had firsthand experience of this linguistic intoxication: In 1982, I was invited to dinner, along with a friend who was editing some of the Maestro’s unpublished music, at Bernstein’s Fairfield home. What I remember most vividly about that long dinner—even more than Bernstein’s noisily rapacious way of eating corn on the cob and suddenly leaping to his feet to perform balletic pliés as a digestive aid—were the postprandial, multilingual word games. The assembled guests were suddenly challenged to cite opening sentences of literary works in as many languages as possible. The pressure was real and slightly uncomfortable.

Linguistic achievements were also on the menu in 1984, when Bernstein made a return visit to the Boston Latin School. The New York Times reports that he explained to students how his teachers made learning a “matter of interdisciplinary cognition—that is, learning to know something by its relation to something else …. A known fact is like a dry, dead thing. But when those connections are made, wham!”

Bernstein’s international connections retain their “wham!” in the Sony/BMG archives, among his few recordings still not transferred to CD. His 1961-62 versions of Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra and Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals feature narrations in Spanish by his wife, the Chilean pianist and actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn. Two other contemporaneous recordings of the same works exist, with narration in Hebrew.

There’s also the world-wide impact of conductors he mentored, like the remarkable John Mauceri, whose 1974 recording of Bernstein’s Candide has just appeared on CD from Sony/BMG. Mr. Mauceri (who will be participating in the Harvard events, sharing his memories as an assistant to Bernstein) is the former music director of the Teatro Regio in Turin and of the Scottish Opera; he’s recently been named chancellor of the North Carolina School of the Arts. And Antonio Pappano, possibly the greatest all-round conductor of his generation, got his start as a rehearsal pianist for a 1980’s revival of Candide and is now music director of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and the Orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome.

It’s safe to say that Lenny’s musical legacy has outgrown our local feud.

Yet as a matter of record, Bernstein was born near Boston, and Massachusetts will be laying claim to him from Oct. 12 to 14, during Celebrating Leonard Bernstein, an international conference and performance festival at Harvard University. A scholarly symposium will include subjects like “Boston’s Bernstein: Jewish Identity and Community,” “Bernstein’s Harvard Student Union Productions: In Search of Political Origins” and “Bernstein’s Senior Thesis at Harvard: The Roots of a Lifelong Search to Discover an American Musical Identity.” Concerts at Harvard will feature Bernstein’s neglected early music like his Piano Trio (1937) and Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (1942), as well as works by his childhood mentors like Solomon Braslavsky, who was choir director at Bernstein’s family synagogue in Boston. Will Harvard succeed in co-opting Bernstein as a Bostonian, snatching away New York’s favorite classical-music son?

New CD and DVD releases suggest that neither New York nor Harvard can definitively claim Bernstein; he belongs to the world. Sony Classical has just transferred to CD a 1956 performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony augmented by a compelling lecture about Beethoven’s sketchbooks, delivered by Bernstein in four different languages: English, Yiddish-accented German, pinched French and vibrant, garlicky Italian.

Bernstein valiantly struggled against Babel, reaching out to conquer foreign languages that separated people. In a new DVD from Deutsche Grammophon of a 1990 concert of Mozart’s music, Bernstein delivers an intense chat in more stately and masterful-sounding German than he could manage in the mid-50’s. He points out that he’s conducting Mozart in a church in Waldsassen, Germany, near the Czech border, a location at “the very heart of Europe.” Contemplating a local war memorial makes Bernstein “realize how totally outmoded wars are, how futile and useless it is for anyone to emerge and claim victory …. Wars only serve as a pretext for satisfying greed, an appetite for power [in the original German, Machthunger], and economic growth at other people’s expense.”

Music can be seen in a visibly international context as part of a slew of new DVD’s of Bernstein concert performances released by Kultur International Films Ltd. They include long-unavailable films of performances in Paris, Vienna, Sydney and Tokyo, among other places. In 1970, Bernstein conducted Verdi’s Requiem in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. Before the concert, as the camera pans over the majestic cathedral, Bernstein’s disembodied voice speaks mournfully about the London Blitz, the Holocaust, the assassinations of J.F.K., R.F.K. and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the death in a 1961 plane crash of U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld.

Intertwining music, language and site-specific history was a compulsion for Bernstein from his days at the Boston Latin School (he was class of ’35). It was at Boston Latin, as Jack Gottlieb writes in an editor’s note to Bernstein’s recently reprinted Young People’s Concerts (Amadeus Press), that the young Lenny picked up German, French, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish and Hebrew — in addition to Latin. Most conductors have enough working knowledge of foreign languages to get them through rehearsals overseas. By contrast, Mr. Gottlieb recalls, Bernstein’s New York study was “filled, floor to ceiling, with dictionaries, etymological works, and phrase books of all kinds. His familiarity with literature was almost frightening in its scope; and his passion for unconventional word games, like cutthroat anagrams and convoluted British-magazine crossword puzzles—the harder the better—almost bordered on the religious …. He was intoxicated with words.”

I’ve had firsthand experience of this linguistic intoxication: In 1982, I was invited to dinner, along with a friend who was editing some of the Maestro’s unpublished music, at Bernstein’s Fairfield home. What I remember most vividly about that long dinner—even more than Bernstein’s noisily rapacious way of eating corn on the cob and suddenly leaping to his feet to perform balletic pliés as a digestive aid—were the postprandial, multilingual word games. The assembled guests were suddenly challenged to cite opening sentences of literary works in as many languages as possible. The pressure was real and slightly uncomfortable.

Linguistic achievements were also on the menu in 1984, when Bernstein made a return visit to the Boston Latin School. The New York Times reports that he explained to students how his teachers made learning a “matter of interdisciplinary cognition—that is, learning to know something by its relation to something else …. A known fact is like a dry, dead thing. But when those connections are made, wham!”

Bernstein’s international connections retain their “wham!” in the Sony/BMG archives, among his few recordings still not transferred to CD. His 1961-62 versions of Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra and Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals feature narrations in Spanish by his wife, the Chilean pianist and actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn. Two other contemporaneous recordings of the same works exist, with narration in Hebrew.

There’s also the world-wide impact of conductors he mentored, like the remarkable John Mauceri, whose 1974 recording of Bernstein’s Candide has just appeared on CD from Sony/BMG. Mr. Mauceri (who will be participating in the Harvard events, sharing his memories as an assistant to Bernstein) is the former music director of the Teatro Regio in Turin and of the Scottish Opera; he’s recently been named chancellor of the North Carolina School of the Arts. And Antonio Pappano, possibly the greatest all-round conductor of his generation, got his start as a rehearsal pianist for a 1980’s revival of Candide and is now music director of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and the Orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome.

It’s safe to say that Lenny’s musical legacy has outgrown our local feud.

"Aha!" said my companion. "That's an old trick from Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence." He looked up at the sommelier. "When some rich businessman who knows nothing about wine orders a really expensive bottle at that restaurant, instead of opening it in front of him, they take it into the back, decant it and fill it up with cheap stuff."

The sommelier looked astonished. "Hey!" he said. "I used to work there!"

So, it turned out, did our Colombian waiter and the chef/owner, Iacopo Falai, who was once Enoteca Pinchiorri's pastry chef. Now it was my friend's turn to be surprised.

I've no idea whether his wine-switching story is true (at Falai, our bottle of Dolcetto certainly hadn't been replaced with a cheap Romanian Chianti), but my companion was fascinated to discover that a team from the famous Florentine restaurant with three stars in the Guide Michelin would wind up on the Lower East Side-out with the cheese knishes, in with the chocolate profiteroles.

Falai is housed in a former gift shop on Clinton Street's restaurant row, where the name of the previous owner, S. Klein, is still emblazoned on the tiled floor of the entrance. The long, narrow 40-seat dining room, designed by Uli Wagner, is entirely white, with terrazzo floors, a pressed-tin ceiling and a lace motif silk-screened on the shiny, white walls. Pieces of clear-cut glass hang in a jagged line above the bar, reflecting the glow of the candles on tables set with white bentwood chairs and lacy white mats. A Hirschfeld portrait of Leonard Bernstein decorates the bathroom and, in the back of the dining room, a plate-glass window gives on to a 25-seat patio garden, also painted white. The whiteness gives the place a surreal feeling. It's a cross between a turn-of-the-century café and a sleek, bustling, modern Italian trattoria, and it's convivial and fun.

As we sat at a table near the front door, people came pouring through; many were turned away because they hadn't reserved a table. Before he opened his own place, Mr. Falai was executive chef at Bread Tribeca, where he attracted a fashionable, international audience. It has followed him here. The women, dressed in expensive, careless-looking but exquisitely crafted clothes and carrying their de rigueur doll's-sized Louis Vuitton handbags, are complimented by the restaurant's white background and soft lighting. A restaurant isn't only about food.

Just as well, since the cooking here is hit-and-miss. Some dishes suffer from a lack of seasoning, others from odd ingredients that don't really add much. Does a perfectly good pork filet with fennel seeds and mashed potatoes really need a sprinkling of cocoa nibs? On the other hand, manzo-a deconstructed beefsteak, cut like shish kebob without the skewers and served in a Brunello di Montalcino sauce with raisins-was terrific. (It's a combination that probably dates from Renaissance times.)

Mr. Falai makes everything in-house, starting with the wonderful little round focaccia and zucchini bread that you're brought when you sit down. He produces a flawless version of such classics such as pappardelle, soft, wide, flat noodles, tossed in a ragu made with wild boar and peas, and farfalle, served with tender baby squid in a rich, spicy tomato sauce. It's hard to believe that the same kitchen can send out such awful gnudi-spinach and ricotta cheese gnocchi-tasting of uncooked flour. I was intrigued by the idea of pici, strands of a thick spaghetti served with white bean purée and "crispy" musetto (pork cheeks). But the pork cheeks were soggy, so the sauce was a mush.

The chef knows how to fry a fish, however. Red mullet was beautifully crisp, served on a purée of fava beans flavored with rosemary and garnished with morels stuffed with cheese (though the morels would've been better without the obfuscating cheese). White polenta topped with chicken liver, dried dates and chanterelles sounded interesting but was disappointingly bland, as was the farro salad with artichokes, pecorino and cumin. But I loved the branzino, which had a crust of mashed black olives, and the juicy roasted langoustines with zucchini.

After he left Enoteca Pinchiorri, Mr. Falai was pastry chef at Le Cirque, so it's not surprising that the desserts here are excellent. The passion-fruit soufflé was perfect. Chocolate mousse looked like half a billiard ball on the plate, shiny and black. "One of the most oddly elegant things I've ever seen," said my companion. An airy panna cotta was made with almond foam and cacao butter and decorated with thin slivers of "petrified" strawberries. The profiteroles were exquisite: a dainty row of five, the size of gumballs, in a delicate puff pastry filled with a marsala mousse, and coated with a sheen of Valrhona bitter chocolate. I'd come back here just for these.

Despite the ups and downs of the food, Falai is a delightful restaurant, with a friendly staff and cheerful atmosphere. Order the right dishes and you may even get a three-star meal. There are 10 sweet wines by the glass to choose from to go with the wonderful desserts, so you'll leave happy.

What unites each group is not so much style as disposition. The troubadours comment: They sing of what we know. The transcendentalists speculate: They sing of things scarcely fathomable. Among the grounded are George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter and John Corigliano. Among the dreamers are Charles Ives, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass and John Adams.

Recently, a pair of back-to-back concerts seemed scheduled to illustrate the difference between the two camps. The troubadour was John Musto, whose song cycle Penelope was presented by the New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) at Merkin Hall. The transcendentalist was Peter Lieberson, whose Red Garuda, a piano concerto of sorts, was performed at Avery Fisher Hall by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by James Conlon, with Peter Serkin as soloist.

Mr. Musto, who is 50, has described himself as a "self-taught composer [but] not a self-taught musician." He grew up in New York and studied piano at the Manhattan School of Music. He says that he "really learned to write music by playing it." He adds: "The very act of learning to play a piece of music is to rethink it with the composer, retrace his footsteps (finger-steps) and then, in the best performances, recompose it onstage."

I've heard Mr. Musto in concert, and I don't know of any full-time composer today who plays the piano with greater panache. In this respect, and others, he resembles arch-troubadour Leonard Bernstein. An unashamed eclectic, Mr. Musto is a recomposer par excellence. His grandly jazzy Passacaglia for large orchestra (2003) sounds like Bach rediscovered by Krazy Kat. His Five Piano Rags (1995) cast the smoky nonchalance of Scott Joplin in a Rachmaninoff glow. His opera Volpone, which had an acclaimed premiere at the Wolf Trap Festival last March, employs everything from Broadway to bel canto in a ferociously clever musical adaptation of Ben Jonson's play. Like Bernstein, Mr. Musto is not afraid to entertain.

His Penelope (2000), a modern take on the Odyssey from the point of view of the wandering hero's home-alone wife, provided the most enlivening entertainment in an uncharacteristically bumpy NYFOS evening. The organization's indispensable impresario, pianist and musicologist, Stephen Blier, had devised a program devoted to songs inspired by Greek myths and poems. As usual, he'd come up with wonderful finds culled from a broad assortment of songwriters (Schubert, Carl Loewe, Hugo Wolf, Gabriel Fauré, Dvorák, Ravel and various 20th-century Greek composers) and an appealing, rising young singer-in this case, a tenor of Greek descent and unaffected charm named Dimitri Pittas. Unfortunately, the program's first half was slowed to a crawl by the excruciating mugging of the baritone John Hancock in the Schubert and the Dvorák selections, and by an excess of explanatory erudition on the part of Mr. Blier, whose off-the-cuff commentaries-so beloved by NYFOS regulars-for the most part restated what he'd eloquently written in the program notes.

After the intermission, Mr. Musto and the soprano of the evening, Amy Burton (who is also Mr. Musto's wife) took the stage, and everything clicked. In seven settings of wistful, witty lyrics by Denise Lanctot, the cycle demonstrated that, despite Penelope's isolation, her memories and longings could be as far-ranging as her husband's worldly peregrinations. Mr. Musto's vocal lines may lack a distinctive profile (their spacey angularity brings Ned Rorem to mind; the moments of rhythmic patter, Stephen Sondheim), but the pianistic writing is gorgeous, by turns sly and spare, like a "walking" Earl Hines, or madly iridescent, as when Penelope thinks back on a kiss long, long ago in a most un-Grecian snowfall.

The cycle's closing song, "Don't Hurry Home, Love," was a sneaky stunner-a bluesy barcarolle in which Penelope luxuriates in the freedom of solitude. I would have liked more sensuous coloring than Ms. Burton's bright, hard soprano was capable of, but she sang with languorous authority, and Mr. Musto was irresistible at the keyboard, recomposing himself-and all those musical ghosts-with glee.

Peter Lieberson, who is 58, would seem to be a troubadour by birthright. His father was Goddard Lieberson, a composer better known as the longtime head of Columbia Records, who pioneered the original-cast recording of Broadway musicals. His mother was the noted ballerina Vera Zorina (who'd once been married to George Balanchine). At Columbia University, young Peter was thoroughly schooled in the musical gospel of the day, 12-tone serialism, as preached by two formidable mentors, Milton Babbitt and Charles Wuorinen; he has described the musical world he lived in then as "hermetic-sealed and self-secret."

In the early 1970's, he encountered an unsealed world. Through his study of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, he learned how to be free-not by rejecting everything he had worked so hard to master, but by putting all of that disciplined study to more expressive use. In an article about his intellectual and spiritual journey, he wrote:

"I began to regard techniques not as concepts that prevent genuine musical expression but as passports to different worlds of experience. I began to play with the techniques my musical teachers had shown me. I threw them around and threw them out, and like boomerangs they would return. I used them in different ways, looking at them from inside and outside. They became like putty, reshaping and reforming for each new piece."

Mr. Lieberson's Piano Concerto, which was given its premiere in 1983 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Peter Serkin as soloist, was his breakthrough piece. It was recorded on the New World label, and when I recently heard it again, I was struck by its powerfully woven "worlds of experience"-explosiveness that becomes spaciously calm, rhapsodic lyricism that dissipates into spark-filled outbursts. I heard grand gestures and rich textures of the great Romantic piano concertos; from the piano I heard the delicacy of Chopin, the punch of Bartók, the spikiness of Schoenberg. Underlying the whole scheme, according to Mr. Lieberson, are the Buddhist principles of "Heaven, Earth, and Man." Yet any religious or personal agenda was subsumed by the sweep of musical events. A clean, purifying wind blows through this encyclopedically knowledgeable score.

In the years since then, Mr. Lieberson-who lives in Santa Fe with his wife, the great mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson-has become even more expansively playful. Red Garuda is one of his most exhilarating pieces. Typically, it has a program derived from Eastern thought: Garuda is the Hindu king of the birds, the carrier of the god Vishnu. The 25-minute work opens with a shimmering bird's-eye view of a new world awakening. Swiftly, with dazzling clarity, it all unfolds: massive cliffs of huge orchestral sound; elemental storms of brass; sweet meadows in the strings; skittering flocks of woodwinds; fabulous sunbursts-all densely packed yet surprisingly airy and elegantly articulated, like an Indian miniature painting. In the Friday-morning performance I attended, the New York Philharmonic was fully alive to Mr. Conlon's command of the score's scintillation; Mr. Serkin, who clearly adores his old friend's music, played the vigorously complementary piano part with incisive brilliance.

There's nothing misty-eyed about Mr. Lieberson's devotion to Eastern beliefs. His grounding in New York modernism is as solid as ever, but he works out of a spirit of adventure that seems primordial. Hindu mythology tells us, in one account, "that as soon as Garuda was born, his body expanded and touched the sky; his eyes were like lightning; the mountains trembled with the spread of his wings." Mr. Lieberson's music, too, touches the sky.

Since the death of Leonard Bernstein in 1990, there has been considerable lamentation about the vacuum in our musical life created by the departure of that protean figure. And yet Lenny's successor has been with us all along in the roly-poly life force that is James Levine. The comparison is interestingly inexact: Mr. Levine, unlike his predecessor, is neither a composer nor a lecturer, only a musical performer. Unlike Bernstein, he is not a public figure: no television persona, no foot on Broadway, no Black Panther parties, no omnipresent swirl. An intensely private person, he is as guarded as Bernstein was porous. Scurrilous rumors about Wildean leanings have surfaced over the years and gone completely unsubstantiated, despite the best efforts of our most high-minded news organs (Time, The New York Times) to get to the bottom of them. More recent rumors about Mr. Levine-does he have Parkinson's disease? Is he about to be named the next music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra?-have been similarly defeated by the man's unsinkable presence. In New York's musical life, he is our Rock of Gibraltar.

Onstage, Bernstein was the great enactor, showing the audience how to feel the music along with him; Mr. Levine is the great enabler, a mop-headed coachman of minimal body language whose feelings about the music are unreadable. Offstage, Bernstein was the maestro in a cape; Mr. Levine is the maestro with a towel over one shoulder. Like Lenny, however, Jimmy (as he is called by his associates) has taken what was once a good, if highly erratic orchestra and turned it into a consistently great one. The Met's productions may be highly variable, the casts not always evenly top-notch, but one thing that Met-goers have been able to count on since Mr. Levine's appointment as music director in 1976 is the ravishing solidity of the orchestra. Thanks to a superb array of first-chair players, the solo parts are invariably heard with lyrical expressiveness. The balance between sections is exemplary. The dramatic line of the opera-even when it becomes as dangerously attenuated as it did in the recent Parsifal-is always palpable and never slack. This is an orchestra that is not only a pleasure to listen to, but also one that feels intimately caught up with what's happening onstage. Mr. Levine understands that opera is, above all, hot-blooded, and the brilliant warmth of his approach yields particularly rich dividends in the composers he does best: Verdi, Wagner and Berg. A Levine performance of even the hoariest work never seems shrouded in mist: From the moment he gives the first downbeat, we are brought face-to-face with the music, such that it becomes the central "character" of the night.

But there are some cracks in the mirror. Mr. Levine's boundless helmsmanship has meant that we have been graced with very few appearances by other maestros of comparable ability. Too often, when the Met's podium is occupied by a visiting conductor, the orchestra can sound merely slick and uninspired. Moreover, even Mr. Levine can be too much of a good thing: By now, his sure grip of the great masterpieces, though rewarding, has become predictable-at least to Met junkies like me. It has been too long since our ears were amazed by the likes of Carlos Kleiber, whose revelatory Der Rosenkavalier remains a touchstone of Strauss conducting in my memory. And is Mr. Levine's understandable delight in his great ensemble in need of tempering? I have heard more than a few former Met stalwarts complain that their careers were shortened thanks to their efforts to be heard above the full-throttle sound he routinely leads the Met Orchestra to produce. In the final two performances of Mr. Levine's marathon run a few weeks ago, he pushed the soloists to their limits, with results that were both glorious and punishing.

Certainly, I won't forget the overwhelming sonic adventure that he made of Verdi's Requiem. This greatest of Verdi's works, the distillation of all that the composer knew about music's capacity to evoke awe and sorrow, terror and tenderness, is mother's milk to Mr. Levine. He marshaled his hugely populated orchestra and chorus with an Achillean virtuosity that was, literally, breathtaking. But the four soloists, whose voices must deliver those incomparable melodies over the mighty clamor, had, in some instances, a less happy time of it. The soprano Renée Fleming produced her usual supply of gloriously arcing notes, but the writing calls for the heft of a dramatic, or at least a spinto, soprano, and when it wasn't soaring, Ms. Fleming's voice-which can best be described as opulent and lyric-had difficulty being heard with consistency, particularly in the closing "Libera Me." (The next day, it was revealed that she had been singing through a bout of tonsillitis.) Marcello Giordani, who has perhaps the finest Verdian top of any of today's tenors, was also obliged to push himself and, especially in the middle register, his tone lost point and definition. The juggernaut bass of René Pape could bring down the walls of Jericho, but even he indulged in some rote bellowing in order to make his full presence felt. Which left only one singer, the great Russian mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina, to carry the honors with complete comfort. Hers is an astonishingly rich, secure instrument from bottom to top, and it's a voice that always seems to have more in it than even the singer can use. In this respect, she is fully Mr. Levine's match, and when she cut through the orchestral tumult without the slightest hint of strain, a smile broke out on the maestro's cherubic face-the smile of a man at the top of his game.

Getting Shaft ed

At a party at Centro-Fly on West 21st Street the evening of June 12, following the premiere of the film Shaft , TV sitcom star Kelsey Grammer sat among the hoi polloi on a banquette, one hand firmly on the leg of his wife, Camille Donatacci. He was looking around the crowd somewhat warily, as though some superfly Shaft manqué was about to sweep down and scoop his bee-sting-lipped wife away from him. There were go-go dancers in cages, there was house music thumping, fog machines blowing and women with flat-screened televisions hung over them like sandwich boards, showing scenes of the film's star, Samuel L. Jackson, blowing gangsters away. Mr. Grammer and Ms. Donatacci did not look particularly comfortable. At the next table, several young men in loose-fitting jeans were passing around a joint, and the couple found their heads enveloped in a cloud of marijuana smoke. The Transom asked Mr. Grammer if it was his dope that the young men were smoking. "Oh, no. No, no!" said Mr. Grammer, soberly. "We can't get away from them!" chimed in Ms. Donatacci.

"Are you going to be nice?" asked Jessica, the Paramount Pictures publicity "escort" who was assigned to The Transom immediately after walking through the door, apparently to make sure we did not ask former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry if he still was smoking crack. The most important task, though, seemed to be making sure that no reporter asked Shaft producer Scott Rudin, star Samuel L. Jackson or director John Singleton why they continually baited each other in the press when the movie was being shot in New York. Their behavior assured that their movie would get the worst spate of press from a movie set since The Twilight Zone . In other words, yes, the Paramount publicity girls were in triage mode.

Jessica informed The Transom that there was no way that Mr. Rudin was going to talk, but she gamely tried to find Mr. Jackson. No luck. "There's Ashford & Simpson," said Jessica consolingly. "And Kool from Kool & the Gang."

The Transom did find the smooth-headed Mr. Singleton and asked him about the rumored troubles on the set. "Everybody's pretty much happy now," he said. "Everybody's kissed and made up."

The Transom went up to the V.I.P. room where Mr. Rudin, Paramount chairman Sumner Redstone and the rest of the Paramount executives were supposedly seated. Paramount vice president of national publicity Susan Ciccone was standing sentry. No press. When The Transom started to ask Ms. Ciccone questions about the party, a large man wearing an earpiece transmitter pushed The Transom away from the entrance.

But luck intervened: There was Mr. Barry walking across the dance floor. We asked him for a quick interview and he invited us to join him in that same V.I.P. inner sanctum. When Ms. Ciccone saw The Transom walking in with Mr. Barry, she flashed a horrified look and immediately began gesturing and pointing frenetically. She yelled for security, who took only a minute to physically pick up The Transom and dump us outside the room.

A kindhearted publicist, Lizzie Grubman, heard about the trouble and tried to secure The Transom an interview with Mr. Jackson, who was in a different room with his own set of posted guards. She asked Marvette Britto, a friend of Mr. Jackson, if the star would do an interview. Mr. Jackson looked down at Ms. Britto. "I was up at 5-o'-fuckin'-clock," he said, in a loud tone of voice. " Hel-lo ? What part of 'I'm tired of talking about this motherfucking movie' don't you understand?"

"He's really tired," Ms. Britto said.

www.kennygsucks.com?

The Internet has given a voice to everyone. This may or may not be a good thing. Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, who has hair like Albert Einstein's, thinks that jazz saxophonist Kenny G, who has hair like Amy Irving's, "plays the dumbest music on the planet." Mr. Metheny wrote that on June 5 and posted it on his Web site, www.patmethenygroup.com.

Mr. Metheny writes that although he was never a fan of Mr. G, he really started loathing him when he listened to Mr. G toodling along to Louis Armstrong's recording of "What A Wonderful World" on Mr. G's 1999 release, Classics In The Key Of G . "Musical necrophilia," Mr. Metheny called it, and continues: "… When Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of … Louis' tracks …, he did something that I would not have imagined possible. He … shit all over the graves of all the musicians … who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played.…"

Perhaps Mr. G. should think twice before he decides to record any "virtual duets" with Charlie Parker.

Bernstein's Web Woes

Movie producer Howard Rosenman said he didn't have a clue as to why somebody logged on to an Internet movie site and downgraded his status as the onetime young lover of Leonard Bernstein to "one-time great friend."

The Transom brought the change to the attention of Mr. Rosenman, who as well as producing mainstream fare such as Melanie Griffith's horny Hasidic film A Stranger Among Us and (next Christmas) Nicolas Cage's three-hanky star vehicle Family Man , has been a proponent of gay-themed cinema. He produced the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet . And it's not as though Mr. Rosenman is in any way closeted: At the 1994 Oscars, Mr. Rosenman was overheard shouting a line no doubt heard spoken by scores of producers daily on every movie lot in town: "What a great night to be gay and Jewish in Hollywood!"

So The Transom was surprised when it checked the Internet Movie Database and noted that, in the last six months, Mr. Rosenman's biography had been changed: the one blunt line stating that he had once been the lover of Leonard Bernstein was now a much longer paragraph consisting of much less dishy Judaica, such as "his family was known as 'Vatikei Yerushalayim,' or 'The Ancients of Jerusalem.'" And as far as l'affaire Bernstein, the site now chastely reads: "Long ago, onetime great friend of maestro Leonard Bernstein." (The original Bernstein tidbit no doubt originated with Mr. Rosenman himself, who, when interviewed for Charles Kaiser's book The Gay Metropolis , said that in 1967 he went to help Israel during the Six Day War, and during the victory celebrations, met and bedded the conductor).

So did Mr. Rosenman suddenly get a little shy, and appeal to the site to change his bio? "I don't know where they got that," Mr. Rosenman said from his Los Angeles office. "I haven't even been [to the site]."

Mr. Rosenman theorized that perhaps a friend had made the changes. He did, however, say that he liked the bio better now. "I didn't think [Leonard Bernstein] should have been on my list of credits," he said. "You know, his children are still alive, and I don't think it's cool to talk about those things."

The Un-Bosses

At the Boathouse Rock 2000 party benefiting the American Foundation for AIDS Research on the night of Monday, June 12, the rain was falling, the lake held a thin layer of fog and the guests were talking about the event they were not attending-Bruce Springsteen's controversial opening night at Madison Square Garden.

Donald Trump made a seven-minute lap around the party, his girlfriend, model Melania Knauss, on his arm. He paused at the celebrity kiss auction booth, where he bid $1,000 on a white piece of paper freshly smooched by Ms. Knauss. The bidding for Britney Spears' pout was at $30.

Jason Sehorn, who plays football for the New York Giants in New Jersey, turned up with fiancée Angie Harmon, who dresses much duller on NBC's Law & Order than she does for charity functions. She was poured into a physics-defying Dolce & Gabbana dress, which, she said, "weighed a ton." "We're going to see the Boss tomorrow night," she said. "I've heard about him all my life, but I've never seen him. So I finally meet my soul mate"-here she looked at Mr. Sehorn-"and I'm like, 'Now we can go see Springsteen! Sweet!'" Mr. Sehorn wasn't as pumped. "I'm not really a Jersey boy. I was raised in California. Not that the Boss is regional, but it's like Jimmy Buffett. If you are from Florida, you love Buffett."

A young actor named David Moscow was introduced to the press pen as "the kid from Big ." "I'm at Columbia and I have a four-page paper due on a painting of Joan of Arc," he said. "It's of Joan when she first heard the angels. It's in the European Art Section of the museum. I don't know who painted it, though. I guess I'm going to fail my class."

Monica Lewinsky's entrance was met with a chorus of "Mo-ni-ca! Mo-ni-ca!" from the paparazzi. She wasn't allowed to talk much though; when The Transom stopped her on her way out and asked if the bag she held was of her own design, she nodded and said, smiling over her shoulder, "You can get them at Bendel's or on the Internet!"

-Rebecca Traister and Jason Horowitz

The Transom Also Hears …

… Ralph Lauren may have gotten cold feet about cooperating with George senior editor Michael Gross' biography of the designer for HarperCollins imprint Cliff Street Books. According to Mr. Gross, back in September Mr. Lauren approached him at Harry Cipriani restaurant and told him that just that very morning, the designer and Hamilton South, then head of marketing for Polo Ralph Lauren, had been talking about letting Mr. Gross pen an authorized biography. Mr. Lauren's choice was rather odd to begin with, given that in the summer of 1988, Mr. Gross wrote a dishy New York magazine profile of Calvin Klein that so infuriated the designer that he pulled Calvin Klein ads from New York for nearly a year. In any case, on April 1, when Mr. South left Polo, the biography may have lost its main proponent, especially as Mr. Lauren and Mr. South did not stay real chummy. Wary of the publicity debacle that befell David Geffen when he stopped cooperating with Tom King's once-authorized biography, Mr. Lauren is said to be exploring how much damage could be caused by not having Mr. Gross back for tea.

"I can certainly understand if he's uncomfortable in the abstract, " the chatty Mr. Gross told The Transom. "Anybody dealing with a journalist is uneasy if they're smart. And Ralph's very smart." Mr. Gross said that he has not heard anything from Mr. Lauren to suggest that he's trying to bow out, though for the last couple of months he has been researching the book and has had no direct contact with the designer. He did say, there will be a book, with or without Mr. Lauren's cooperation. Neither Mr. South nor Mr. Lauren returned calls.