Today I loaded up the CD player with 5 from Sony's Bernstein Century series with some rarities from the Columbia years:
1-2: Bach: St. Matthew Passion (Leonard Bernstein/New York Philharmonic Orchestra/The Collegiate Chorale/The Boys' Choir of the Church of Transfiguration w/soloists); also included "Bernstein Discusses the St. Matthew Passion"
3. Nikolai Lopatnikoff: Concertino for Orchestra; Luigi Dallapiccola: Tartina for Violin and Orchestra; Harold Shapero: Symphony for Classical Orchestra (Leonard Bernstein/Columbia Symphony Orchestra w/Ruth Posseit, violin, on Tartina for Violin and Orchestra)
4. Gyorgy Ligeti: Atmospheres; Morton Feldman: Out of "Last Pieces"; Four Improvisations for Orchestra;Edison Denisov: Cresendo e Diminuendo; Gunther Schuller: Triplum; Olivier Messiaen: Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine (Leonard Bernstien/New York Philharmonic Orchestra w/Paul Jacobs, piano; John Canarina, ondes martenot; and the Women's Chorus of the Choral Arts Society on Trois Petites Liturgies de la Presence Divine)
5. Ives: The Unanswered Question; Holidays Symphony; Central Park in the Dark; Elliot Carter: Concerto for Orchestra (Leonard Bernstien/New York Philharmonic Orchestra w/Seiji Ozawa and Maurice Peress, co-conductors on Central Park in the Dark)
By-and-large Leonard Bernstein avoided the Baroque repertoire, covering the usual big hits by the Big Three of the Baroque Era: Handel, Vivaldi, and Bach such as Messiah, The Four Seasons, and the St. Matthew Passion respectively. He did a few other Vivaldi concertos, the Bach Piano Concerto #1 with Glenn Gould and the Double Violin Concerto with Isaac Stern and Yehudi Menuhin, and not much else; and after he switched over to DG I don't think Bernstein did anything Baroque at all. If you're a purist, a certainly if your of the HIP persuasion, you might not like Bernstein's thoroughly un-HIP, abridged and translated into English, St. Matthew Passion, but I think it's quite good taken for what it is, and for me it was good St. Matthew starter kit that helped me to understand Bach's musical and religious vision. And the CD set is no less valuable for Bernstein's "Discussion on the The St. Matthew Passion" used for filler.
The remaining three discs sees Bernstien in an even more unusual mode as he uncovers what was then contemporary and what remains some music of the most abstract and ultra-modern composers of the 20th century. With the exception of Charles Ives, who Bernstein covered and discussed often; Bernstein may not have loved this music because he usually avoided it, and like the above mentioned Baroque fare, did not revisit these composers or any music along the same lines after he switched over to DG. Even so, Bernstein chose not to do the obligatory Second School of Vienna album or group of albums that was done by the likes of Karajan and Ormandy, and instead of the usual Schoenberg, Berg & Webern venue (It sounds like a Viennese law firm); he strikes out on a different path with some other composers who were doing interesting things during the 1950s and 1960s. If you have an aversion to the abstract and the ultra-modern, do not fear the music of the music of Lopatnikoff, Dallapiccola, and Shapero, as they are actually quite listenable, especially Dallapiccola who with his Italian touch, manages to make 12-tone music sound a bit bright and sunny. Moving on to Ligeti, Feldman, Denisov, Schuller, and Messiaen; things do start to get far out, as far out as Bernstein ever gets, but he I think Bernstein does his best to be sincere. We end with the music of Ives to which Bernstein was a champion, and then Elliot Carter, who still mystifies (not music to break out at a party!), but I guess Bernstein wanted to show that he could do Carter and the like as good as anyone, of he wanted to.
I saw in a Bernstein lecture on YouTube once, where he said that he believed in tonality; but Bernstein also believed in what his friend and mentor, Dimitri Mitropoulos once said, that there is a "sportive element in music"; so maybe Bernstein climbs that mountain of atonality just because it's there.