Bradley Cooper, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Carey Mulligan reunite for a Philadelphia love fest in NYC

NEW YORK — “I am from Philadelphia, and you are the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and we met at the Metropolitan Opera,” said Bradley Cooper on Wednesday night.

He was just getting started with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and his Maestro costar Carey Mulligan at New York City’s David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

The conversation came right after Nézet-Séguin’s performance with the New York Philharmonic, featuring selections from the soundtrack of Maestro, the Leonard Bernstein biopic directed by and starring Cooper, now streaming on Netflix.

Bernstein’s children Nina, Jamie, and Alexander — who Nézet-Séguin said were dancing to Candide’s “Overture” during the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival last year — were present in the audience.

Cooper and Nézet-Séguin met in 2015 when the latter conducted Otello at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. When Cooper told him that he was interested in making a Bernstein biopic, Nézet-Séguin invited him and Mulligan to Philadelphia, where Bernstein honed his craft at the Curtis Institute of Music.

The actors, who’d go on to play Leonard Bernstein and his actress wife Felicia Montealegre in Maestro, narrated the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Candide in 2019. “I said yes because I wanted the job, but I asked my mother, ‘how can you narrate an opera?’ ” Mulligan said.

Cooper, Nézet-Séguin told GQ last year, “came to everything: chorus rehearsals, piano rehearsals, cast rehearsals, staging rehearsals.”

He also recorded a video of Mulligan watching the Philadelphia players rehearsing, which eventually inspired the scene where Mulligan as Montealegre watches Cooper as Bernstein conduct the London Symphony Orchestra, recreating Bernstein’s 1976 performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2.

Cooper took six years to perfect that scene, which later pans to reveal Mulligan in the audience.

“I wanted to get back to this feeling of Carey looking at the rehearsal in Philadelphia,” Cooper said.

The Candide rehearsals in Philadelphia also inspired the scene where Montealegre sits watching Bernstein rehearse “Make Our Garden Grow.” That scene, for two years, marked the end of Maestro, Cooper added. “The way [the orchestra players] were watching you and you were watching them in Philadelphia. How much they loved you, you could see that.”

For Mulligan, the New York evening with the three of them, was a full-circle moment harking back to the night in Philadelphia where they went to dinner after an orchestra performance. “I thought, ‘Gosh, Yannick is so nice, but he is such a big deal,’” said Mulligan, who is up for a best actress Oscar.

“And then to have you be so generous with us, with your gift, with everything you know, thank you,” she said to Nézet-Séguin.

“This was a great opportunity. I learnt so much,” said the conductor, who served as the film’s conducting consultant and the conductor of new recordings. “But my personal experience [with Bernstein] was as a child wanting to conduct when I was 10. It was the beginning of the CDs and I bought a Leonard Bernstein recording with the Vienna Philharmonic, and he was immediately my hero. But I only knew him as a conductor.”

Maestro, for Nézet-Séguin, was about opening up classical music. “We’re all musicians. What’s classical, anyway?” he asked rhetorically. “In the 1970s, Bernstein was a visionary. He didn’t categorize things too much, [today] we embrace everything.”

“The goal is to present the power of this music to people who aren’t accustomed to listening to this music. There is nothing comparable to coming into a hall like this and watching these musicians perform,” said Cooper, who was often made to stand in between the violins and the violas during the Philadelphia Orchestra rehearsals.

“We feel [as] classical musicians, what we do is for everyone but somehow a lot of people [don’t think so.] We are not as well known as Beyoncé, let alone Taylor Swift. So when someone like Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan decides that [we’re a part of their] vision and artistry, it [makes] our music more known,” Nézet-Séguin said.

“I hope after watching Maestro, people will search for Leonard Bernstein and Gustav Mahler on their Spotifys.”

Maestro, which is nominated for seven Oscars including best picture, best actor, and best actress, is now streaming on Netflix.