Apparently there are decades' worth of photos that were taken by staff photographers at Columbia Records, which Sony acquired in 1988. The images were more or less collecting dust until last year, when Sony started selling reproductions of them via its newly created boutique business, Icon Collectibles. Now, an exhibition of photos from Columbia’s 30th Street Studio is slated at the gallery for mid-July. "We're looking to take advantage of all the assets of the company, not just the audio recordings. We have the content, and we found a way to tap into it," John Ingrassia, president of Sony BMG Music Entertainment’s commercial music group, told The Times. Some of the hot-ticket items include:

• "Miles Davis recording Kind of Blue in 1959 at the company’s old 30th Street Studio."
• "Bob Dylan standing with then-girlfriend Suze Rotolo on a slushy Greenwich Village street in 1963."
• "Bruce Springsteen proudly holding a copy of his first record in 1973."
• "Johnny Cash deep in thought with a guitar on his lap in 1959."
• "An image of Sly Stone in front of a reel-to-reel tape player in 1973."
• "Dramatic photos of Muhammad Ali, then still known as Cassius Clay, recording the 1963 spoken-word album I Am the Greatest!"

No word on what the originals might sell for, but if it's any indication, the reproductions cost $300 to $1,700.

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.

For those of us with long memories, Mr. Gelb’s talk of reconnecting the Met to the world sounds familiar. By enlisting such chic directors as Anthony Minghella, Robert Lepage and Peter Sellars, Mr. Gelb is merely following in the footsteps of his two most powerful predecessors, Joseph Volpe and Rudolf Bing, both of whom, on some level, tried to plug the Met into the fashions of the day.

Two recent productions that attracted a good number of the city’s opera lovers can be read as signposts pointing forward and back the way we came. The backward-pointing sign is the Met’s revival of Verdi’s La Forza del Destino, a 1996 production by Giancarlo del Monaco. The forward-pointing sign was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the conductor William Christie and his troupe of Baroque players and singers, Les Arts Florissants, performed Handel’s Hercules in a production by a leading figure in today’s European avant-garde, the Swiss director Luc Bondy, a name that Mr. Gelb has dropped favorably in conversations about his plans.

Forza is one of Verdi’s problem operas—a non-Aristotelian sprawl of revenge melodrama and purple piety that lurches from Spain to Italy and back again over a span of 15 years. The del Monaco production is resolutely traditional—realistic for old Seville, luridly picturesque for the scenes in a tavern and an Italian village destroyed by war. Except for one marvelous bit of business—the candle-lit stage filled with prostrate, praying monks during the great choral scene for “La Vergine degli Angeli”—the staging is unremarkable: no updating for contemporary “resonance,” nothing unsuspected revealed. This Forza is simply a grand pictorial vehicle for the music.

Which is fine with me. Forza was my very first opera, and back in 1952 so overwhelming were the principal singers—Zinka Milanov, Richard Tucker, Leonard Warren, Jerome Hines—that I was blissfully unaware of any infelicity in the staging. Beginning with its famous galloping overture, the opera tears along on some of Verdi’s most vivid music; for sustained intensity, its stirring arias, duets and choruses are exceeded only by Otello.

Musically, this Forza wasn’t quite on that exalted level. The tenor Salvatore Licitra, only recently recovered from a bout of flu, struggled manfully if fitfully with the killer part of Don Alvaro, causing me once again to wonder how long this naturally glorious voice can hold up with so little support from the diaphragm. As Padre Guardiano, Sam Ramey, always a persuasive stage presence, was having one of his wobbly nights vocally. But Mark Delavan (whose rich, soft-grained baritone is so reminiscent of Warren’s) made a terrifying figure of the vengeance-crazed Don Carlo; the fortune-teller of Ildikó Komlósi and Fra Melitone of Juan Pons were wholeheartedly Verdian; and as the heroine Leonora, Deborah Voigt glowed with easy, majestic radiance.

A young Italian conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, led a spirited, marvelously singer-sensitive performance, signaling that as long as he’s available, the company’s Verdi repertoire is in good hands. Here was the “old” Met doing what it has always done better than any other opera house in the world: rocking the chandeliers with grand opera on a visceral level, which—when all is said and done—is where grand opera lives. We’ll sorely miss nights like this at the Met, if the new management decides that this sort of Forza is old hat.

OUT AT B.A.M. A FEW NIGHTS LATER, I couldn’t help but think how paltry an affair Mr. Bondy’s Hercules would seem in the Met’s vast red barn. Even in the close quarters of the Howard Gilman Opera House, the setting, cast and chorus—a nondescript warehouse with only a battered trash can for furniture, populated by young singers in casual contemporary clothes—failed to capture my interest for most of the first act. Though Mr. Christie conducted with his usual deft pacing and sense of drama, and though his charges produced high-flown Handel with wonderful ease and intelligibility, I had to fight to keep myself awake through the endless, expertly produced tunefulness.

But I gradually became aware that a powerful, unforgettable performance was in the making—that of the young American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as Dejanira, the title character’s wife. Tragedy wrought by marital jealousy is the subject of this late Handel work, which lies uneasily somewhere between an oratorio and a full-fledged opera. Ms. DiDonato’s deeply focused passage from grief to misplaced rage to a kind of self-induced madness was so riveting that by the third act, Mr. Bondy’s boomer-friendly staging had ceased to matter. Only when Ms. DiDonato, a rising young star at the Met, commanded the stage did this Hercules seem like a harbinger of a future I could happily embrace.