Bernstein was a profoundly "cultured" person who involved himself deeply and broadly in cultural and political life. He loved literature and generally composed and thought about music in a literary sort of way. In a discipline that almost over-emphasizes originality and considers anything that hints of being "derivative" as one of the worst of sins, Bernstein almost gloried in the inter-relationship of musical and cultural ideas and loved the game of identifying the various musical influences on his and (to their irritation) others' music. It is a commonplace that Bernstein was highly eclectic. His specifically literary bent is less often studied, but it is quite definite. Almost to a piece his opus carries literary reference and when words are not present, the music is programatic.

This evening's concert offers us 3 divergent examples of this "literariness". Inspired by W. H. Auden's extended prose poem "The Age of Anxiety", is, like the Serenade after Plato's "Symposium" is a wholly programatic work wherein Bernstein in a very real sense is gloss the poem through his music, lending his own voice to Auden's conversation. In Songfest the artist gives musical setting to 13 important American poets, in a grand work commissioned for the Bicentennial. As Bernstein himself was used to doing, this eveing Maestro James Paul has directed that the poems be read as well as sung.

For this extraordinary evening the Maestro and the Festival Symphony Orchestra welcome a host of special soloists: pianist Victor Steinhardt, actor Grant McKernie, and vocalists John Aler, Maria Jette, Janice Felty, Christine Meadows, Daniel Washington, and Les Young.