Pacific Symphony to pay tribute to Leonard Bernstein

Carl St.Clair can pinpoint the last moment he saw Leonard Bernstein. The two had just conducted a show together at the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts, and Bernstein, who had trusted his own composition to St.Clair’s baton, urged him to attend a recording session a few months later.

It was an exciting invitation, but it had a precarious lining. By the time of that concert in August 1990, Bernstein’s health had deteriorated visibly, and he gave St.Clair — then a Boston Symphony assistant conductor — the assignment to conduct his piece after walking offstage midway through a rehearsal and reasoning that he would need help at the podium.

At what turned out to be Bernstein’s final performance, the iconic composer and conductor handled works by Beethoven and Benjamin Britten while St.Clair took over on Bernstein’s song cycle “Arias and Barcarolles.”

At a reception afterward on the lawn of a private estate at Tanglewood, Bernstein gave his cohort a tip to drop by the studio, where the New York Philharmonic was set to record “Arias.”

“The last word he said to me was, ‘I’ll see you in December; you have to be there for the recording,’” St.Clair recalled.

Two months later, Bernstein died at age 72. Around that time, St.Clair became music director for the Pacific Symphony, a position he’s held for a quarter-century.

Thursday through Saturday at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, the Laguna Beach resident will pay tribute to his mentor with “For the Love of Bernstein,” a retrospective of Bernstein’s life and career.

Among the items on the program is a selection from “Arias,” which St.Clair has conducted only a handful of times since that day substituting in Massachusetts.

“I remember we were sitting next to one another on this small couch in the green room of Tanglewood, in the shed, and he just said, ‘Cowboy, do you have it in you?’” St.Clair said, alluding to the nickname Bernstein gave him when he learned that his protege was a native Texan.a

“I said, ‘Mr. B, you just tell me what you want me to do and I’m there for you.’”

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‘His own nonstop circus’

“Mr. B.”

That was the nickname St.Clair insisted on for Bernstein — and the one his role model accepted as a compromise.

To most everyone else in Bernstein’s inner circle, the “West Side Story” composer was “Lenny.” St.Clair, who explained that he needed people in his life to address as “Mr.” and “Dr.,” couldn’t bring himself to say Lenny. So “Mr. Bernstein” it was until, in St.Clair’s recollection, Bernstein facetiously put him in a chokehold at a restaurant in Vienna in the late 1980s and told him to knock off the formality.

St.Clair, who had joined Bernstein on a tour of Europe and Russia, suggested “Mr. B,” and that version proved more tolerable.

When he first met Bernstein, St.Clair was grateful to be able to call him anything. By 1985, when St.Clair joined Tanglewood as a composing fellow, Bernstein had forged an eclectic career for nearly a half-century, serving as director of the New York Philharmonic and giving classical music lectures for youths on television. In his 1990 obituary, the Los Angeles Times dubbed him a “Renaissance man of music who excelled as pianist, composer, conductor and teacher and was, as well, the flamboyant ringmaster of his own nonstop circus.”

He may have been a flamboyant ringmaster, but St.Clair recalls him as a benevolent one too. When the younger man conducted a piece, Bernstein would sit amid the musicians onstage and give him his full attention.

“He was always the consummate teacher,” St.Clair said. “He really cared about those whom he decided to help.”

When it came time for St.Clair to return the favor, he didn’t hesitate. Before the Tanglewood show on Aug. 19, 1990, Bernstein gave his protege a crash course in “Arias” and handed him the baton. The performance went well, but the New York Times, in its review, devoted at least as much attention to Bernstein’s diminished state as to the music.

The conductor “looked drawn, and his trademark flamboyance was muted,” critic John Rockwell wrote. “His habit of abstaining from actual baton-waving for a minute or two is a familiar Bernstein stunt. But he started coughing into a handkerchief during the Beethoven third movement. And he seemed truly exhausted, even in pain, as he walked off the stage amid the concluding ovations.”

St.Clair, the review added, “caught the spirit admirably” of Bernstein’s new piece. “But one still wished fervently that Mr. Bernstein had felt well enough to conduct his score himself.”

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An existential song

That wish, however, never came true. In early October, citing health concerns, Bernstein announced his retirement from conducting, and several days later, he died of a heart attack brought on by progressive lung failure.

Less than a month later, St.Clair, newly instated as Pacific Symphony director, conducted an excerpt from “Arias” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, now known as the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. The piece he chose, “Greetings,” is a brief, lullaby-like song that consists of three lines:

When a boy is born, the world is born again and takes its first breath with him.

When a girl is born, the world stops turning round and keeps a moment’s hushed wonder.

Every time a child is born, for the space of that brief instant the world is pure.

The eight songs in “Arias” cover assorted phases of life: a childhood bedtime story, a daughter’s wedding, a tribute to a mother. This week, St.Clair will present “Greetings” along with the youthful vignette “Little Smary,” and both songs will feature soprano Dawn Upshaw — another member of Bernstein’s inner circle, who, according to St.Clair, sang at his 70th-birthday party at Tanglewood.

Also in the Segerstrom concert, Upshaw will sing a duet with Jamie Bernstein, the composer’s daughter and host for the night’s program. Since the late 1990s, the younger Bernstein has narrated concerts of her father’s music, and she collaborated with St.Clair in 2009 on an educational Pacific Symphony production, “The Bernstein Beat.”

In addition to the “Arias” selections, “For the Love of Bernstein” will include the composer’s Symphony No. 2, “The Age of Anxiety,” plus the “West Side Story” classic “Somewhere,” selections from “Candide” and “On the Town” and more.

The concert is “an opportunity for me to pay homage and to be thankful and to reflect on people who have really helped me, not only during these 25 years but throughout my career,” St.Clair said. “When I made the list of those who I should make sure and acknowledge, certainly Mr. Bernstein was really at the top of the list.”

That should be Lenny, of course. But in the spirit of compromise, Mr. B will suffice.

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If you go

What: “For the Love of Bernstein”

Where: Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday; preview talk with Alan Chapman begins at 7 p.m.

Cost: $25 to $99

Information: (714) 755-5799 or https://www.pacificsymphony.org