Sir Gilbert Levine

Sir Gilbert Levine

I think it was Bernstein who made me think it was possible,' says Gilbert Levine of his upbringing in a non-musical family, adding 'there were exactly three classical records in my family's record collection,' in an effusive, Brooklyn-flecked accent.

Born in New York in 1948 and raised amid the city's bustling music and arts scene, Levine was drawn to music not by familial prompting, but rather by the lure of the piano in the living room - and the thrill of seeing Leonard Bernstein's famous telecasts; 'I was so moved by the personality and music-making - he was an inspiration,' he recalls.

After taking up the piano and bassoon in his youth, Levine enrolled at Juilliard, having resolved early on to give himself as wide a grounding in music as possible. His hunger for greater musical erudition led him to graduate studies at Princeton (with 12-tone guru Milton Babbitt) and Yale, and to Paris to studying score-reading and analysis with Nadia Boulanger. 'Conducting was always the goal,' he says, 'but I understood that you needed to have a great deal of elaborate practical background and preparation before you made that leap.'

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