It’s more than 30 years since the death of Leonard Bernstein, but the world is having a fresh bout of Lennymania. Last week Bradley Cooper’s new film Maestro – Cooper both directs and plays the conductor-composer – was greeted rapturously by critics on its premiere in Venice.
Few on the planet have a greater connection to the lionised American musician than Marin Alsop, 66, who will conduct the Last Night of the Proms on Saturday for the third time in her career, but even Bernstein’s one-time protegee admits that the bisexual maestro would have fallen foul of today’s behavioural codes. “He would have been cancelled. Every day he would have been cancelled.”
As a nine-year-old growing up in New York City, Alsop watched Bernstein’s Young
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