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‘Maestro’ Review: Leonard Bernstein’s Life of Ecstasy and Agony
As director and star, Bradley Cooper delivers an intimate portrait of the composer and his many private and public selves.


By Manohla Dargis

“Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s intimate portrait of Leonard Bernstein, takes flight with a terrific whoosh of exuberance. The young Bernstein (played by Cooper) has just gotten the phone call that will change his life. He’s been asked to step in for an ailing guest conductor and lead the New York Philharmonic; it will be his conducting debut. Overjoyed, Lenny, as he’s often called, jumps up, throws open a curtain and then sprints out of his apartment to race, bathrobe flapping, into his dazzling, very public future as an American genius.
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Watch Bradley Cooper conduct a cinematic symphony as Leonard Bernstein in new Maestro trailer
The film will release in select theaters in November before its Netflix debut on Dec. 20.

By Wesley Stenzel

The full trailer for Maestro, Bradley Cooper's much-anticipated sophomore directorial project, is finally here.

The Star Is Born filmmaker is back with another music-based romance — this time, the film tracks the decades-long romance between legendary composer Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and his wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan).
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Conducting Lessons: How Bradley Cooper Became Leonard Bernstein
For “Maestro,” Cooper learned from top conductors like Gustavo Dudamel and Yannick Nézet-Séguin — and by stealth in concert halls or from the orchestra pit.

By Javier C. Hernández

On a late-spring day in 2018, when the New York Philharmonic was deep in rehearsals of a Strauss symphony, an unexpected visitor showed up at the stage door of David Geffen Hall, the Philharmonic’s home.

The visitor, Bradley Cooper, the actor and director, had come on a mission. He was preparing to direct and star in a film about Leonard Bernstein, the eminent conductor and composer who led the Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969. He was asking the orchestra’s leaders for help with the movie, “Maestro,” which has its North American premiere on Monday at the New York Film Festival.

The Philharmonic is accustomed to having luminaries at its concerts. But it was unusual for someone like Cooper to express such deep interest in classical music, a field often neglected in popular culture.

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Why the Real Star of the New Bradley Cooper Film ‘Maestro’ May Be a House
Leonard Bernstein’s country house hasn’t changed much since the composer hosted Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins there. Jamie Bernstein is OK with that.

By Joanne Kaufman

In the early 1960s, after a number of summers renting on Martha’s Vineyard, Jamie Bernstein’s family bought a vacation home on a wooded hill in West Redding, Conn. There, 9-year-old Jamie and her younger brother, Alexander, devised various games of make-believe, chief among them a fantasy that they lived the same sort of low-key, small-town existence as the characters on their favorite television shows.

It was a testament to the imaginative gifts of children whose actual home was a duplex apartment across the street from Carnegie Hall, and whose father was the celebrated, heat-seeking “West Side Story” composer and New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein.
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‘Maestro’ First Look: Bradley Cooper Is Leonard Bernstein in ‘A Star Is Born’ Follow-Up
Netflix is expected to release the biopic, which is being produced by Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, in 2023.

Christian Zilko

When Bradley Cooper directed “A Star Is Born” in 2018, he instantly established himself as one of Hollywood’s hottest directors. The Oscar-winning film demonstrated Cooper’s ability to update old material for contemporary audiences and to seamlessly integrate music into his movies. Those two skills will certainly come in handy on his next outing behind the camera: “Maestro,” a new Leonard Bernstein biopic that sees Cooper playing the legendary composer in addition to directing. ( Read more... )

West Side Story History Lessons From Music Producer David Newman

BY JACK GIROUX

It's almost as if destiny brought composer David Newman to Steven Spielberg's "West Side Story." Newman, who composed "Anastasia," "Galaxy Quest," and Danny DeVito's films, first worked on "West Side Story" as a teenager. Since then, the Broadway show and the 1961 film adaptation have been a major part of his career and life. When the time came to work on Spielberg's film as a music producer and score arranger, he was more than ready for the mammoth task.

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‘Bernstein’s Wall’ Review: A Doc Tribute to the Consummate Conductor Who Subverted Radical Chic
Telluride: Douglas Tirola's collage portrait lets beloved composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein tell his story in his own words.

Ryan Lattanzio


There aren’t many stains on the legacy of consummate conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, best known as the long-running maestro, front and center, for the New York Philharmonic beginning in the 1950s.( Read more... )