A Glimpse Into a Maestro’s Salon, After Hours
“Late Night With Leonard Bernstein,” a look at the after-hours maestro, which opened the 2011-12 season in the Copland House concert series.
Whether Bernstein cleared any rooms was beside the point. Ms. Bernstein’s story revealed his mischievous personality and musical predilections, and that was enough to engage the packed opening-night crowd. After the pianist Michael Boriskin attacked the variations with the kind of gusto Bernstein was known for, the audience filled the music room at the Merestead estate in Mount Kisco with lusty laughs and applause — much as Bernstein’s merrymakers might have done.
Mr. Boriskin, the artistic and executive director of Copland House, said the concert series there, now in its third season, was tailored to an audience “for whom the sense of adventure and discovery is important to their musical experiences.” As the program unfolded, the performers’ small asides, fleeting smiles and tears — Ms. Bernstein’s eyes welled up at the sight of her father on screen — were clear to most of the audience. The Merestead space — a former living room, smaller than Lincoln Center’s Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, where the show was first staged last fall — has an intimacy that Ms. Bernstein said marked it as “ideal” for a program that peeks into her father’s home, and head.