Dudamel backs Tár for an Oscar and Blanchett for a baton

From Vanity Fair:

If Cate Blanchett is indeed prepared to take a break from acting, then she might already have a new gig lined up, thanks to her Oscar-nominated performance in Tár.

On Monday night at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, Vanity Fair hosted a conversation between Blanchett, Tár writer-director Todd Field, and powerhouse conductor Gustavo Dudamel, the current music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who recently made headlines by accepting the same role at the New York Philharmonic.

From the start, it was clear that Dudamel was quite taken with Tár and its approach to a world he knows well—he even makes a cameo in the film, glimpsed on one of his album covers. Calling the film “wonderful,” “unique,” and “very credible,” Dudamel told Blanchett, “Your way to conduct, your gesture, is very natural.” In return she joked, “Are you offering me a job?” He didn’t blink: “Absolutely, you can become music director in Los Angeles!”

Later, more seriously, Dudamel asked if Blanchett had any interest in becoming a real conductor. “This is not an interview of that sort!” she said with a laugh. “But no, it was extraordinary…. When we had to prepare on Zoom, our conducting consultant, Natalie Murray Beale, said, ‘Nothing is going to prepare you for the experience of you giving the downbeat, and that sound coming back at you and through you.’ It was an unforgettable, life-changing experience. I mean, you get to do that every day.”

“You have to feel prepared, but you cannot predict what is going to happen,” Dudamel said of his work on the podium. “That is something that you don’t learn in a school of conducting. You learn the factual things, you learn the structure, the interpretation, the history, but no teacher will tell you what is going to happen there. You felt that.”An overarching theme of Tár is the power inherent to being a conductor, something Dudamel says he sensed even as an 11-year-old stepping on to the podium for fun. “For me, conducting is more than leading something; it’s trying to guide people through inspiration,” he said. “When I did my first rehearsal, I was 11 years old, my maestro was late, I was in the violin section, and I went to the podium and started to play-imitate him and other conductors. I was making jokes and all of that. In a moment, everything got pretty serious. I was like, This feels good. Power feels good. It was the most natural thing. I was not prepared for that.”

More here.