Steinberg On Bernstein, Back In 1964

Michael Steinberg, the former Boston Globe music critic who died yesterday at 80, on the premiere of Bernstein’s “Kaddish”: “There is something enviable about the utter lack of inhibition with which Leonard Bernstein carries on. His Symphony No. 3 (Kaddish) is a piece, in part, of such unashamed vulgarity, and it is so strongly derivative, that the hearing of it becomes as much as anything a strain on one’s credulity.”