I'll be seening Maestro tomorrow night (with friends who have Netflix). I have heard a great deal (both positive and negative) about the movie, including the fact that it doesn't contain much about Leonard Bernstein the composer, so I'm getting myself ready for the experience by reminding myself of who he was as a musician. If you have arrived here for the same reasons, Richard Kogan's lecture is a great place to start:
I'm also re-reading Jonathan Cott's Dinner with Lenny (here's a post I wrote about it in 2013), and an exerpt from The Infinite Variety of Music that I wrote about in 2005. In 2010 I wrote a post to mark the twentieth anniversary of Leonard Bernstein's death, with a link to a special edition of Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs filled with reminiscences of him by members of his family.
I overheard the movie trailer, and can report that Bradley Cooper captures the nasal quality that came into Leonard Bernstein's voice as he aged, but the pitch is just a semitone or so higher, and the timbre is a little less gravelly. I imagine it was enough for Cooper to fill Leonard Bernstein's shoes, body, and personality during the filming of this movie, but I can't imagine he would have inhaled enough tobacco to capture the gravel in Bernstein's voice. But I recall Bernstein's voice as an older man, and Cooper is portraying him as a younger man.
By the way, the one thing that Leonard Bernstein couldn't do musically was sing. Stephen Sondheim said that he had a voice like a frog.
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