Bradley Cooper Vs Leonard Bernstein

The 2023 Bradley Cooper-directed biopic, Maestro, is up for 7 Oscar nominations. It may or may not win all gongs in March. But Cooper’s performance as American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein is a fiery depiction of a fiery character that will certainly give Cillian Murphy’s more taut, internalized depiction of Robert Oppenheimer a run for its baton.

And nothing reflects this more powerfully than one continuous scene in the film: Cooper/Bernstein leading the London Symphony Orchestra and Edinburgh Festival Chorus in the legendary 1973 performance of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C Minor – ‘Resurrection’ – at Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire, England. Or more precisely the last 6-odd minutes of Resurrection’s tumultuous fifth movement.

Cooper’s portrayal as Bernstein is all the more remarkable because of the intense physicality he puts into his performance of an intensely physical man. For the role, and the scene, the actor studied the legendary film recording of the Ely concert by Humphrey Burton. And the result is an astounding rendering of a soaring, sweating, almost evaporating Bernstein.

Watch this short, but revealing, frame-to-frame comparison of Cooper in Maestro playing at Ely, and below it, footage of Bernstein’s original gig at the cathedral.

The glorious violence of Mahler’s choral stretch being channeled in the lightning rod of Bernstein as well as Cooper-as-Bernstein. The flailing hands, the furioso, the picking of notes from Ely’s thick sonorous air – Cooper matches Bernstein move to move, movement to movement, down to dripping sweat.