Bradley Cooper is still recovering from the Best Actor Oscar loss to Cillian Murphy. Cooper earlier revealed to multiple sources that he spent six years in training to play the role of American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein in Maestro. His six-year training was put to intense scrutiny when his conducting scene from Maestro was examined by classical music experts.
According to the experts, Cooper did a decent job than most other actors, who they knew butchered the music scenes. However, there were pretty basic flaws in the conducting that may force fans to question the time spent on training for the musician’s role.
Classical Music Experts Find Mistakes In Bradley Cooper’s Conducting Scene In Maestro
Bradley Cooper started his Oscar campaign for Maestro well before any other actors by letting the audience and the Academy know of his struggles with the role. He detailed his six years spent with the character of Leonard Bernstein and his musical career. However, he failed to beat Cillian Murphy‘s Oppenheimer performance, which took only six months of preparation and Murphy won the Best Actor Oscar.
While Cooper went to cringe-worthy levels of getting attached to the late musician, some of his efforts were proven futile by two classical music experts. Brett Yang and Eddy Chen of the YouTube channel, @TwoSetViolin, call themselves the Classical Music Detectives and analyze the portrayal of musical performances in films and TV. For one of their latest episodes, they watched the American Sniper actor’s famous conducting scene in Maestro and had some comments.
The two experts weren’t overly critical of Cooper’s performance as they revealed that he captured the essence of Bernstein with his performance. However, Cooper made a few foundational mistakes in the conducting. During a scene where Cooper was playing the piano, they found that he was playing the wrong note for the music and even had the wrong wrist movement.
The experts also commented that Cooper had uncontrolled energy in the conducting scene, which resulted in some mistakes. Some of the complex conducting scenes did not feature Cooper in them but rather showed the concertmaster, who was actually part of the famous London Symphony Orchestra. As a final test of their scrutiny, they played along with the Aloha actor’s conducting.
This play-along exposed several problems in his conducting skills as their music quickly turned into chaos. The experts had only positive words for Cooper as he had got quite a few details right and they appreciated his effort to learn the skill which was extremely difficult according to them. However, Cooper’s impressive effort failed to sway fans in support of him due to the alleged Oscar rivalry between him and Cillian Murphy.
Bradley Cooper Trained For Six Years To Conduct Live As Leonard Bernstein
In an attempt to showcase Leonard Bernstein’s musical genius of conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in 1976, Bradley Cooper decided to film the conducting scene live. He opened up about this scene to Lin-Manuel Miranda while attending the Los Angeles screening of the film. Cooper did an extremely detailed study of Bernstein’s conducting in 1976 and also took help from Metropolitan Opera director Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
He revealed that Nézet-Séguin made videos for him with all the tempo changes and Cooper added his touch of cinematic elements into the scene. He revealed that he was absolutely terrified to film the scene. Cooper shared with Miranda (via IndieWire):
“I spent six years learning how to conduct six minutes and 21 seconds of music. […] Nézet-Séguin made videos with all the tempo changes, so I had all of the materials to just work on. It was really about dialing exactly what I wanted cinematically and then inviting them into then inhabit that space and trusting that they have all done the work. Because I think that I knew I was terrified, absolutely terrified that if I hadn’t done the work then I wouldn’t be able to enjoy myself in these scenes. And everybody did.”
Unfortunately, the film did not win a single Oscar out of its seven nominations. The Hangover star became the subject of brutal internet memes for his snubs during the award season. Maestro is now available for streaming on Netflix.
