Leonard Bernstein became an “iconic voice” of this age, as conductor John Mauceri puts it. While most music lovers associate Leonard Bernstein with his most famous masterpiece West Side Story, he wrote not only hit musicals with unmistakable songs but also full symphonies, ballet suites, operas, song cycles, choral pieces and more. His first hit musical, in fact, came out of a ballet suite he wrote for Jerome Robbins. Fancy Free was so successful in 1944 that it became the source material for On the Town, a collaboration with Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who were nice enough friends to star in the musical too).

Conductor John Mauceri observes about Leonard Bernstein’s extensive body of work: “Exploring his output, one finds the famous and obscure— works that both are reflective of their times and somehow also preserve and encapsulate them. Everywhere one hears his internal struggle to sound inevitable a…