Abington/Jenkintown native Bradley Cooper was recently featured in The New York Times in an article titled “Conducting Lessons: How Bradley Cooper Became Leonard Bernstein”.

“Maestro,” Cooper’s upcoming movie, has him playing dual roles as actor and director and taking on the life of Leonard Bernstein, a conductor and composer who led the Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969. Some consider Bernstein the most influential American maestro of the 20th century.

The article describes five years of Cooper’s preparation, including regular appearances at the Philharmonic’s concerts and rehearsals to better understand the mind of Bernstein and the underpinnings of classical music. Cooper has been seen sitting in the conductor’s box peppering musicians with questions, visiting the orchestra’s archives to examine Bernstein’s scores and batons, and joining Philharmonic staff members on a trip to Bernstein’s grave in Brooklyn.

“You could see that he was watching with a very special eye,” said Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director. “He wanted to get into Bernstein’s soul.”

An excerpt:

He attended dozens of rehearsals and performances in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Berlin and at Tanglewood in Massachusetts. And he befriended top maestros, including van Zweden; Michael Tilson Thomas, a protégé of Bernstein who led the San Francisco Symphony; Gustavo Dudamel, who leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who served as the film’s conducting consultant.

Maestro is in theaters on November 22 and on Netflix on December 20. For the full Times article, you can click here. For our previous coverage on the film, you can click here. For more on Cooper’s efforts to prepare for the role, you can watch the interview below:

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Photos: Netflix