Radio: Talent Show

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Composer-Conductor Leonard Bernstein raises his baton this week on CBS's Omnibus to conduct Handel's Messiah. But a great many of his viewers are certain to be disappointed. They would much rather hear talented Lennie Bernstein talk about music than play or conduct it.

Bernstein, 37, has built his fanatic audience in a series of three Omnibus programs. In the first he discussed the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and used an orchestra to trace the changes Beethoven made in the movement and patterning of his music. Says Bernstein: "Nobody knew whether people would sit still for 45 minutes on a subject like this. I had a notebook full of Beethoven's rejected sketches. We put them back into the symphony to see how it would have sounded if he hadn't been so determined on perfection."

Plumbers & Sociologists. Next Bernstein tackled "The Jazz World," and held viewers spellbound with an intense, often intricate and always absorbing explanation of syncopation. He followed it with another 45-minute show on "The Art of Conducting" that answered for thousands the question of what—if anything—the baton-wielder is doing while the orchestra plays. Omnibus and Bernstein were staggered by the response: "We had letters from plumbers, sociologists, little children and old men. Apparently, hundreds of people identified themselves with the conductor, standing in front of their screens with rulers and pencils in their hands and giving the beat and tempo. Even musicians liked it. I should have thought experts like Isaac Stern and Jennie Tourel would have been bored to tears, but they thought the show did a great deal for music, for the whole business of music."

As a teacher, Bernstein is intense yet detached, dedicated yet wellrounded. He is contemptuous of the cult of "music appreciation," and thinks that love of music should be as complex and emotional as love itself. "We live in our emotions," he argues, "and that is the area a teacher must reach—and as soon as possible. If you can strike an emotional spark, then you can teach anything."