Jamie BernsteinSpeaks at FJC about her memoir Famous Father Girl
Tuesday, February 5 at 1:00 P.M. in FJC's Speen Hall. Free and open to the public. Book sales handled by Falmouth's independent bookstore, Eight Cousins.
Falmouth Jewish Congregation invites the public to a free Jewish Book Council author talk and book signing on Tuesday, February 5 at 1pm, when Jamie Bernstein will discuss her widely-acclaimed book “Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein.” The oldest daughter of revered composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein, Jamie offers a rare look at her father on the centennial of his birth in a deeply intimate and broadly evocative memoir. Eight Cousins Bookstore will handle book sales. Light refreshments will be served.
In Famous Father Girl Bernstein mines the emotional depths of her childhood and invites us into her family's private world, one bursting with music, theatre and literature. Her father, composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, and her mother, pianist and actress Felicia Montealegre—who filled the house with a veritable who’s-who of friends in arts and letters—created an ebullient atmosphere that turned Jamie into a lifelong cultural enthusiast. A fantastic set of characters populates the Bernsteins' lives, including: the Kennedys, Mike Nichols, John Lennon, Richard Avedon, Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins, and Betty (Lauren) Bacall. The book is an intoxicating tale and an intimate meditation on a complex and sometimes troubled man, the family he raised, and the music he composed that became the soundtrack to their entwined lives. Deeply moving and often hilarious, Bernstein's beautifully written memoir is a great American story about one of the greatest Americans of the modern age.
Jamie Bernstein is an author, narrator, and filmmaker. Inheriting her father’s passion for sharing and teaching, Jamie has devised several ways of communicating her own excitement about classical music. In addition to “The Bernstein Beat,” a family concert about her father modeled after his own groundbreaking Young People’s Concerts, Jamie has also written and narrated concerts for audiences of all ages about Mozart, Aaron Copland, and Stravinsky, among others.
As a concert narrator, Jamie has appeared everywhere from Beijing to London to Vancouver. A frequent speaker on musical topics, Jamie has presented talks around the world, from conferences in Japan to seminars at Harvard University. In her role as broadcaster, Jamie has produced and hosted shows for radio stations in the United States and Great Britain. She has presented the New York Philharmonic’s live national radio broadcasts, as well as live broadcasts from Tanglewood.
Jamie is the co-director of a film documentary, Crescendo: the Power of Music—which focuses on children in struggling urban communities who participate in youth orchestra programs for social transformation inspired by Venezuela’s groundbreaking El Sistema movement. The film has won numerous prizes on the festival circuit, and is currently viewable on Netflix. In addition to writing her own scripts and narrations, Jamie writes articles and poetry, which have appeared in such publications as Symphony, DoubleTake, Town & Country, Gourmet, Opera News, and Musical America. She also edits “Prelude, Fugue & Riffs,” a newsletter about issues and events pertaining to her father’s legacy