The Maestro in love

If you write today’s date in the US fashion of month first and you leave out separators you get: 123123. My Sunday movie was Maestro about the love between Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre, who became his wife. I’m pleased to see the movie did not avoid Bernstein’s love of several men. Was he bisexual? Was he gay and married a woman anyway? From this movie and its depiction of the love he showed Montealegre I’m more likely to believe he was bisexual, but the only one who can say for sure is Bernstein. The story begins, of course, with his 1943 call to conduct the New York Philharmonic with just a few hours notice and turning it into a rousing success. Since he was the assistant conductor he was supposed to know the music for that exact situation, though he may not have rehearsed with the orchestra. Little of the movie shows Bradley Cooper, who portrayed Bernstein, actually conducting an orchestra. There is a six minute segment of him conducting the finale of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony and Cooper does a fine job at being as over the top in his conducting as Bernstein was. There are news reports he studied conducting for six years to get those six minutes right. One aspect of that scene amused me – the scene took place in Ely Cathedral in England but the sound didn’t reverberate as it would in such a big stone space. What was on the soundtrack was recorded by the London Philharmonic ahead of time. Cooper looked like Lenny and sounded like Lenny and, since Lenny appeared on TV and other video recordings so frequently, Cooper had lots of examples and did a good job in acting like Lenny. Nearly all the music in the movie is either Bernstein’s own or Mahler’s. That right there is a good reason for me to watch.