In his time, Leonard Bernstein was classical music’s biggest star, not for his own compositions but as a conductor who championed overlooked masterpieces and as an educator. He was classical music’s great public advocate.
Alistair Cooke’s 1950s television series, “Omnibus,” was an intelligently presented cultural showcase, its long run disproving the assertion that all early network TV was lightweight. The four-DVD set “Omnibus: Leonard Bernstein” collects the conductor’s various appearances on the program from 1954-1958.
In his “Omnibus” debut, Bernstein investigates Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, written when the great composer was blind and going deaf. Bernstein had no grand theory about the music’s meaning; he comes across as a formalist who viewed symphonic composition as a challenge to find the right notes and arrangements. Valuable is his insight into Beethoven’s method of trial and error. The 5th didn’t come out whole but was a matter of many decisions made and choices not taken. For “Omnibus,” he conducted an orchestra through some of the discarded variants found among Beethoven’s papers to show why they just weren’t as good as the familiar, finished version. The staging was inventive, placing Bernstein on a floor painted with the 5th’s score and extending to a gray, uncertain horizon. It looked like an episode from “Twilight Zone,” not a tedious exercise in music appreciation.
