ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — Leon Botstein has been president of Bard College here, 100 miles up the Hudson from New York City, since 1975. He is an outspoken advocate for education. For instance, he believes that college should begin after 10th grade, and at Bard he has created the largest prison education program of any college in the country.
He is one of our few remaining public intellectuals. Last year, Stephen Colbert joked that Botstein -- who has a bulbous shaved head -- was the quintessential pointy-headed intellectual when the bemused academic appeared briefly on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report."
But Botstein is also a musicologist, teacher, author and founder of the uniquely stimulating Bard Music Festival, which is devoted to exploring in depth a different composer each summer. He is a brilliant public speaker, inveterate panelist and first-rate fundraiser.
And he is a conductor. In New York, he heads the American Symphony Orchestra. In the Israeli capital, he is music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, with which he will appear at Royce Hall on Tuesday night. He has made 30 recordings in recent years. His rediscovery of a gripping symphony by Shostakovich's forgotten contemporary Gav- riel Nikolayevich Popov won him a Grammy nomination in 2006.
He has just released the first recording of an extraordinary British rarity from 1923, John Herbert Foulds' "A World Requiem" -- a 90-minute, mystically tinged tribute to the World War I dead that in some of its techniques is half a century ahead of its time.
Still, Botstein has always struggled to get respect. He is colorful, charming, friendly, funny, wry. (Full disclosure: I served under him as an editor at the scholarly journal Music Quarterly in the '90s.) Yet he has an uncanny ability to generate suspicion and make enemies, particularly in the musical establishment. Until recently, he couldn't buy a good review in New York. Although he is an active guest conductor in Europe, he has never been invited to conduct a prominent American orchestra.
The principal charge against him is dilettantism. In an age of professionalism and specialization, no one should be able to do so many different things well. Similarly, Leonard Bernstein used to be trotted out as a prime specimen of genius spreading itself too thin.
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