Afternoon Screenings and Conversation with Nina Bernstein & Ken Smith
Registration 1:45 pm
Screening of Forever Beethoven 2:00 pm 
Conversation 3:00 pm
Coffee Break 3:30 pm
Screening of Leonard Bernstein conducts West Side Story 3:45 pm
Close 5:15 pm

Forever Beethoven | 55mins | 1968 | English 
Leonard Bernstein conducts West Side Story | 89mins | 1984 | English with English subtitles

Conductor, composer, author, educator…Few musical figures of the past century have generated such excitement or maintained so large a legacy as America’s multitasking maestro Leonard Bernstein. Nina Bernstein introduces audiences to her prodigiously gifted father in this double bill. Christopher Swann’s 1984 documentary "Leonard Bernstein Conducts West Side Story” follows the composer as he prepares and conducts the first complete recording of his musical theater masterpiece, with soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and José Carreras as the star-crossed lovers. In Forever Beethoven, a 1968 episode from his landmark Young People’s Concerts for CBS Television, Bernstein (with the help of the New York Philharmonic and pianist Joseph Kalichstein) explains and shows how this “bad-tempered, stubborn, arrogant, moody, grubby, sloppy little man” wrote such endearing classics and became the most popular symphonic composer who ever lived.

This event is part of the worldwide Leonard Bernstein centennial celebration.

Nina Bernstein is Leonard Bernstein’s youngest daughter. After working as an actress, initially at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, she turned her attention to tending her late father’s legacy. In the earliest days of the internet, she worked with the Library of Congress on making the Bernstein Archives digitally available to the public. From 2000 to 2005, Nina worked on “Leonard Bernstein: A Total Embrace,” a film about her sister, Jamie, and her remarkable journeys around the world bringing Bernstein’s music and teaching legacy to new audiences. Since 2008, Nina has been working as a food educator in underserved communities.

Journalist Ken Smith has traveled widely, covering music on five continents. The Asian performing arts critic for the Financial Times, he is a winner of the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music writing and the author of Fate! Luck! Chance! ...the Making of The Bonesetter's Daughter Opera. He was an advisor to David Henry Hwang’s bilingual Broadway comedy Chinglish and the musical Kung Fu, based on the life of Bruce Lee, for New York’s Signature Theatre.

In cooperation with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra