Maestro – a review of the movie

As a big fan of Leonard Bernstein, his music and a fellow gay man as well as an amateur musician, I approached this highly anticipated movie with certain expectations, albeit trying my best to keep an open mind. 

In a behind-the-scenes interview with Yannick Nézet-Séquin, the conducting consultant and conductor for the new music on the movie soundtrack, he was extremely complimentary of Cooper’s acting achievement as a convincing conductor. He explains that his approach to preparing Cooper for the role requiring him to conduct and orchestra was not to try to faithfully mimic Bernstein’s conducting or be overly concerned with the all-consuming technicalities of beating time but to allow for the actor to inhabit the Bernstein conducting persona and also to be free to feel the music and command it with the emotional abandon so characteristic of Bernstein. 

Having performed this monumental piece of music myself several times as a chorister, I’ve had the privilege of experiencing very different styles of conducting of this same piece; from the confident and clear assertiveness of Benjamin Zander to the untrained awkwardness of Gilbert Kaplan and the unique gesticulating physicality of Vladimir Ashkenazy. The most interesting of these was Gilbert Kaplan, an American businessman and financial publisher who, as an aficionado of Mahler’s music, had learnt to conduct just this one piece and goes around the world conducting nothing but Mahler’s 2nd Symphony. While we could certainly feel Kaplan’s personal connection with and passion for the music, it was evident that his late schooling in the art of conducting meant his gestures and ability to communicate musically with orchestra members and singers was less than ideal. In some ways Cooper’s conducting reminded me of Gilbert Kaplan’s conducting, where it was more about him egotistically inhabiting the music than it was him playing the other important technical and organisational role in steering the musicians before him towards a unified output. 

When you examine the clip of Bernstein conducting that final choral passage, as much as you see flashes of him being entirely lost in the music, there is still much eye conduct between him and the human forces he is controlling. While luxuriating in the music, he mouths the German text in a way that conveys his understanding of the meaning of what is being sung. And yet with Cooper’s version, it’s almost like he knows the musicians could go on in auto-pilot mode without any of his cues. Behind-the-scenes footage of him rehearsing on an empty stage with maestro Nézet-Séguin watching on suggests that Cooper was thoroughly rehearsed and focused on miming what had been pre-determined for him to slot into. The orchestra sometimes moves ahead of his confusing time beating, landing on the beat before his baton has reached the cue. And the way he merely opens his mouth forming expressive shapes that don’t quite correspond to the text indicates he wasn’t adequately concerned with such essential details when emulating Maestro Bernstein directing an orchestra. 

A conductor is ever so instrumental in determining how the music turns out. Conducting is a highly communicative activity, not just the way he waves his hands to regulate tempo, volume, and the musical colour, but their facial expression, demeanour and posture are all relevant cues to the musicians they lead. While Cooper’s carriage in much of the 6-minute-long scene is commendable and compatible with the music we are hearing, there a few moments where his concentration lapses so his chest collapses just when there’s a crescendo in the phrase, clearly giving away that he’s not exactly in sync with how the orchestra was prepared and he’s not quite on top of things on the podium. 

For me, Cate Blanchett’s recent portrayal of a leading conductor in Tar, albeit a fictional one, was more successful as she came across more convincingly. Was she better prepared? Or was it perhaps a case of better cinematic choices made in how the conducting scenes were filmed and edited, which managed to cover up any obvious technical shortcomings. Cooper was incredibly ambitious to try and present a full 6-minute sequence of himself conducting a difficult section of a hugely challenging piece, with such irregular and demandingly tempi changes and interpretational scope.