The Mind and Music of Leonard Bernstein with Dr. Richard Kogan

Leonard Bernstein, renowned for his dynamic conducting and compositions like “West Side Story,” remains a towering figure in 20th-century music. Explore the fascinating intersection of Bernstein’s genius and the mind with Dr. Richard Kogan in a TED-like lecture and piano performance. Trained at Juilliard in piano and Harvard Medical School in psychiatry, Dr. Kogan, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Artistic Director of the Music and Medicine program at Weill Cornell Medical Center, offers a unique perspective.

Richard Kogan’s concert lecture audiences hear him recount Bernstein’s life “from his first cigarette to his last dying day”, interspersing oral history and anecdote with performances of “Somewhere”, “Maria”, “Tonight”, “One Hand, One Heart”, “America” and more. Dr. Kogan offers a psychiatric perspective on Bernstein’s complex personality in this program as well.  He identifies Bernstein as a man of voracious appetites, the satisfaction of which caused enormous guilt.  Still, Dr. Kogan points to Bernstein’s remarkable capacity to sustain contradictions.  He cites Bernstein’s balancing of the tensions between elite and mass appeal, between emotions and the intellect and between tradition and innovation.  Dr. Kogan contrasts these with Bernstein’s irreconcilable bisexual conflicts and his struggles to balance the life of a composer and the life of a performer.

photo: Paul de Hueck, courtesy the Leonard Bernstein Office, Inc.