(“Can’t” is Alsop’s four-letter word, she tells us.) There’s the childhood sonata in which a violin-playing daughter of New York-based string players attends one of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts in the ‘60s and decides she wants to do what he’s doing, only to be told throughout her growing years that girls can’t become conductors. Alsop does the telling too, in interviews and voice-over and in scenes where Wegenstein follows her around the world (São Paulo, Lucerne, Vienna) as she readies a Mahler symphony. Its straightforwardness aside, “The Conductor” approaches Alsop’s life not unlike a symphony, its parts gradually unifying as a narrative of singular ambition, achievement and fortitude. Yet while “The Conductor” isn’t redrawing the documentary form, it’s nevertheless pleasurably illuminating as admiration cinema about a feminist hero who bucked tradition and broke rules to make herself - and the significant music she’s curated - heard on her terms. The long-accepted irony of the bio-doc genre (which makes it no longer an irony, really) is that the type of trailblazing figure who earns feature treatment doesn’t usually get a similarly trailblazing, or even just gloriously offbeat, movie about them in return. She’s also absorbed the hopes of young baton-holding aspirants and underserved musicians everywhere, nurturing their dreams and spreading them far and wide. In her years of cultural leadership, she’s been more than just an internationally renowned conduit for the intentions of history’s great composers and the sounds filling a concert hall. In the world of music, when Marin Alsop became the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s music director in 2007 - the first woman to head a major American symphony - a conductor became a lightning rod.īut when classical music’s elitist, patriarchal old guard quieted, as Bernadette Wegenstein’s new biographical documentary “The Conductor” shows, Alsop’s vision and abilities got to be the story. Science has shown that lightning rods are conductors.
Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health officials. The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic.
0 kommentar(er)
