Bradley Cooper's Maestro

Amazing filmmaking.
I knew it was about his life and not the music before I went in. Amazing use of music.


*SPOILERS?*


My wife, who played the Mahler 5 in her community orchestra realized, it was A CUE being used from the transition in the story from black and white to color and when the relationship with his wife changed.

I also watched one of three interviews Cooper did with AFI. Really lots of technical detail with the Sike Lee interview

If you watch it on Netflix with captions, it will state what musical work is being played. More than a few existing works were used as cues, including Bernstein's On the Waterfront and, of course, Westside Story.

Was just listening to a radio interview with Michael Stern, the son of Isaac Stern, who's a conductor himself and who knew Leonard Berstein as a kid growing up as well as interacting as a young Curtis student and later also a conductor (the "Three Michaels' Concert" in the 1980s at NY Phil with Bernstein is a wonderful anecdote).

His view is the movie is first of all a story of one marriage and one family, and additionally of a woman called Felicia who lived with Lenny the Hurricane and the sacrifices she had to make. His memory of her is less clear, but says the actress who played Felicia was outstanding. He also said that Bradley Cooper was very convincing as the older Lenny.

He talks about Berstein as a conductor, his charisma, brashness and self-confidence, creativity and how different he was from every other conductor of the time. His most interesting criticism of the movie, in my opinion, is that it focused on the duality and contradictions of Bernstein's sexual life - even though this duality was really everywhere: in the music he was involved with, classical vs jazz, his private and public persona, his domineering and approachability. Maybe the movie would have had more depth if the sexual part was folded into this bigger picture. That's how I understood the gist of it.

Anyhow, if anyone is interested, the interview is here (topmost audio link). He's coming back next week, apparently.

More by Michael Stern on Leonard Bernstein here: