The prospect of the new Bernstein film is dislocating me a bit, back to the late 60s and 70s....
recordings of the Rite, Sinfonia, El Salón Mexico; Stravinsky, Beethoven, Copland, Foss, many others... my record player in the room shared with my brother, between the dressers; concerts, then later playing on stage at Wolf Trap Farm Park. The electric strangeness of Mass, at the Kennedy Center in 1971, when I was 14....
This stuff is all deeply embedded in me: my dad liked his records too. When people later talked about Bernstein bringing Mahler back to everyone's attention, it always confused me a bit, because these things seemed to have always been famous.
Even the pictures they're showing before the film premieres: they've got the photographic tones of the time, it all has that slightly heightened glow, a bit too much of each primary hue....
In the middle of the night (during a summer that already feels temporally and existentially blurry), it feels like a chunk of history fell out of the sky onto my head, and I wake with uncertainty as to what decade it is.
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