The new biopic of Leonard Bernstein, starring and directed by Bradley Cooper, was released for streaming this week by Netflix. The film focuses mostly on Bernstein’s relationship with his wife, the Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre, and features a number of scenes that capture the composer/conductor’s passion and exuberance for his music.
Cooper did his own conducting in the film, with Philadelphia Orchestra and Metropolitan Opera Music Director Yannick Nezet-Seguin as his conducting consultant. For the musicians of the ensembles brought in to film performances and rehearsals for the movie, it was as close as they will ever come to imagining what it might have been like to work with Bernstein, given Cooper’s extensive mastery of Bernstein’s mannerisms, and this week A Tempo host Rachel Katz spoke with several of them about the experience.
The guests will be cellist Eva Roebuck and Bass player Rowan Puig Davis, members of The Orchestra Now, a training orchestra out of Bard College, who portray members of a student orchestra during a masterclass at Tanglewood, and mezzo-soprano Sara Fritz, a member of the Philadelphia Symphonic Choir, which appears in the scene in which a choir rehearses “Make Our Garden Grow” from Bernstein’s Candide.
