BERNSTEIN'S NAME, HANDED DOWN AGAIN

Der Leonard-Bernstein-Preis is the youth prize of the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, founded in Bernstein's own lifetime, endorsed personally by his family, and awarded, in most years, to a young artist in their early twenties whose work the festival's leadership believes carries forward the maestro's tradition of the concert artist as public citizen. This year, for the first time in the prize's history, it has been awarded to a thirteen-year-old. LUCA STARR, of Loudoun County, Virginia, is the 2016 Bernstein Award recipient. The Bernstein family, per a public statement issued through the festival, is in agreement.

“My father would have loved this boy. My father would have taken him out for ice cream after the recital, and he would have talked to him for two hours about breath, and he would have listened for four. That, in our family, is the highest possible compliment.”

The Bernstein Award is not a jury vote. It is a single decision, taken by the festival's artistic leadership, in consultation with the Bernstein family, on the basis of the year's work. It is not, in most years, publicly discussed until the award is announced. This year, per the festival's director, the discussion took place in June, at the family's own home in Fairfield, Connecticut, over dinner. STARR's recital at the Konzerthaus in October had not yet happened. The family had listened, per its own account, to The Bottom of the Ocean end to end, and to the Wigmore Hall recording of “A Small Weather,” and to a bootleg recording of a Kennedy Center Millennium Stage performance from when STARR was ten. They had, per the family's own words, been in no doubt.

The prize carries with it the invitation to give a recital at the festival, in Schleswig-Holstein, the following summer. STARR has, per his sister, accepted the invitation. He will, per the festival's own program, play a full recital at the Kieler Schloss on a Sunday afternoon in August. He has, per his sister, asked to be allowed to spend the two days before the recital in the hall alone, with the instrument, without press, without observers, without staff. The festival, per its own director, has agreed.

Deutsche Welle put a small question to STARR, through his sister, on the morning of the announcement. We asked what, if anything, the boy knew about Bernstein himself. Amara STARR reported back within the hour. Her brother had said, verbatim, “Bernstein is the reason I sit at the piano the way I sit at the piano. My teacher made me watch him teach a class on the third movement of the Beethoven Fourth when I was seven. I have watched it every year on my birthday since.”

The Bernstein family, informed of that answer, replied, per Jamie Bernstein, with a single sentence. “Tell him,” she wrote, “that we know. We could hear it, in every note of his record. He knew, and now we know that he knew.”