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WOS Radio: Edward Seckerson Talks to Jamie Bernstein

Who would have thought - certainly not she - that the little girl perching on her famous father's podium would grow up to carry forward his legacy and one day recreate one of his fabled Young People's Concerts with his very own orchestra - the New York Philharmonic.

Jamie Bernstein was 10 years old when the picture was taken but she remembers those concerts so vividly (as does anyone who heard them) that it has long been her ambition to second guess the kind of programme that Leonard Bernstein might have imagined would engage the youth of today.

She and the orchestra's current music director, Alan Gilbert, have come up with a kind of "Postcard from New York" hand-delivered as part of a four-concert residency, the New york Philharmonic's first as an international associate of the Barbican.

Jamie will present and even "sing" as part of this vibrant, pulsing, snazzy, jazzy programme and in this exclusive audio podcast - recorded in the Bernstein family apartment in New York City - she tells Edward Seckerson what it was like growing up with arguably the greatest musical polymath of the 20th century - namely her dad.

It's an intimate and amusing portrait she paints but it doesn't shrink from acknowledging what it took for her father, a chronic insomniac, to keep his musical ambitions alive and still remain at the heart of his family. This four-concert residency will vividly keep his memory alive in programmes that he himself might have devised and conducted.

- by Edward Seckerson

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External Links
	The Young People’s Concert page on the Barbican website