Music: Youth Accented

The 27-year-old wunderkind of the musical world, Leonard Bernstein, opened his fall season last week. His Broadway musical, On the Town (TIME, Jan. 6), still packed them in. His ballet, Fancy Free (for which he wrote the music), was the most popular Ballet Theatre attraction at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera House. Nervous, earnest Bernstein has still not decided whether he wants to be a composer or a conductor, a jazzman or a classicist. Last week he led the municipally owned New York City Symphony for the first time, after only one week of rehearsals. He had replaced more than half of the musicians inherited from Conductor Leopold Stokowski. Now there was only one slightly bald head in the whole orchestra. There were twelve ex-servicemen. The orchestra thumped its way through Brahms’s Second Symphony, which Brahms wrote at 44. But critics liked best young Conductor Bernstein’s version of Shostakovich’s First Symphony—which Shostakovich wrote at 19.