Christopher Raphael
Christopher Raphael
Gianluca Pulcini
Christopher Raphael
Christopher Raphael
Fill 1
Fill 1
January 03, 2017
Features

Mozart and Moonlight

For the third season of Mozart in the Jungle, the production moved from New York to Venice, where no less than Placido Domingo joined the cast for a night shoot on the Grand Canal. The Italians have a word for that: bellissimo!

Benji Wilson

It is 1:30 a.m. in Venice, and after a fiercely hot day the weather is closing in.

The wind has started to bluster, and the few gondolas left on the Grand Canal are bobbing like rubber ducks. Many tourists have scuttled back to their hotels ahead of the storm, but the famed Ponte dell’Accademia (Accademia Bridge) is still lined with crowds.

They’re braving the weather on account of a rumor: Plácido Domingo is on a barge just down the canal, moored outside the grand entrance to the 16th-century Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti — and he is going to sing. Music lovers pay thousands of dollars to hear the great tenor, but right now, if they stick around, they just might do so for free.

There’s a bonus for TV fans, too: standing next to Domingo is actor Gael García Bernal, conducting. The two are working on a blue-ribbon scene from the third season of Amazon Studios’ Mozart in the Jungle, debuting December 9. Last year, among a host of awards and critical acclaim, the half-hour dramedy won an Emmy for sound mixing — and this scene makes it clear why what the sound mixers do is outstanding.

Domingo has already recorded a version of “Là ci darem la mano,” a duet from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, but when “Action!” is called, he sings again, with a live string quartet. (“You have to put the effort in,” he says later, “otherwise it doesn’t look right.”)

The crowds cheer and the wind blows. There are mics everywhere: later, a mixer will have to turn all of these disparate sound sources into beautiful music, and overlay Bernal’s prompts to the orchestra and other dialogue.

Fans of the first and second seasons of Mozart might be wondering, what is Maestro Rodrigo De Souza (Bernal) doing in Venice?

From the beginning, the series has been set in New York City, where Rodrigo — an offbeat, pony-tailed young conductor from Mexico, loosely based on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Gustavo Dudamel — has been brought in to shake up the New York Symphony.

By the end of season two, Rodrigo has lost the ponytail, the orchestra’s contract negotiations have broken down and the musicians have been locked out.

“Rodrigo had a legal problem,” Bernal explains. “He had to sign a non-compete clause that meant he couldn’t conduct another orchestra. So he has gone to work on an opera in Venice instead.”

Led by executive producers Jason Schwartzman, Roman Coppola, Will Graham and Paul Weitz, Mozart is the kind of show where, if the script says, “Open on a barge in Venice,” Venice is where they’ll go.

So, five episodes of the new 10-part season have been shot in Italy’s fantastical water-bound burg. “Our ambition is to make compelling, smart and beautiful series that are as unpredictable as real life,” notes Joe Lewis, Amazon Studios’ head of half-hour and drama series development.

“We like when the audience can’t predict the turns a story will take, and we’re often surprised ourselves, such as with Mozart’s extended story in Venice this year.”

It’s a bold and expensive move, one that has surprised even seasoned stars like Malcolm McDowell.

“I’d like to know what network would say, ‘Where do you want to shoot? How about Venice?’” posits McDowell, who plays Thomas Pembridge, the aging maestro whom Rodrigo has replaced. “That’s unheard of! For a TV show to bring 100 people here in the middle of the summer? It’s actually insane! But it seems to be working out all right.”

Not without some effort. On the barge the wind is picking up, there’s the occasional rancid, fishy waft from the canal, and tourists keep stumbling into the background of the shot.

Due to the weather, the crew has had to improvise: the original script called for Domingo to be in a gondola, pulling up alongside a barge on which Italian actress and former Bond girl Monica Bellucci — playing a diva à la Maria Callas — would sing with him. The wind put an end to the gondola, and Domingo is now on the barge with Bellucci.

But if the weather has made for a tough evening shoot, you wouldn’t know it from Bernal. One of his heroes is about to perform on his show. “I once said that Plácido Domingo would be my dream guest,” Bernal confesses, “and now here he is, appearing on the show. It’s crazy! Plácido is incredible.”

Speaking later, Domingo repays the compliment: “I’ve followed the career of Gael since he started in his first film.”

Bernal called him up and asked him to appear in Mozart, Domingo explains. The singing star agreed because he loves television — he reels off a list of appearances, including an episode of The Simpsons and spots with Johnny Carson, David Letterman and Jay Leno (as well as segments opposite Sesame Street’s Miss Piggy and a part in the film Beverly Hills Chihuahua).

But there’s also a crusader’s zeal behind Domingo’s appearance on Mozart, a renewed attempt to bring classical music to the masses via television, the ultimate democratic medium.

“Ever since we did the concert of The Three Tenors [in 1990 with Luciano Pavarotti and José Carreras], we started approaching more and more the general public, not only the opera lovers,” Domingo says. “This is just another example of trying to spread the word about classical music.

"The problem has to do with education. Pop music is very easy for everybody. Classical music is not known by the children. Mozart in the Jungle, a television program set in this world of classical music, is part of that education.”

Bernal takes up the theme: “One of the functions of the series is to bring people to the world of classical music, and it’s doing its job. It’s not saying, ‘You have to listen to classical music.’ But it brings people to the music in a tangential way through the characters.”

He tells the story of a teenager he met, a member of a youth orchestra in his native Mexico.

“This 14-year-old kid was a brilliant violinist. He came up to me and said, ‘Can I talk to you? I’m a bit shy. When I saw the first season of Mozart in the Jungle, I decided to start studying conducting.’ “I went, ‘Really? Because of this silly show we do?’

“He said yes. That kid started studying to be a conductor like Rodrigo. He needed a little thing like that to inspire him. That’s one of the best reactions I’ve ever had [to the show]. That’s when Mozart in the Jungle really works. We don’t make the show only for those reasons, but I’m very happy that it has had that effect.”

Still, the show — inspired by the book Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music by oboist Blair Tindall — is much more than an advertisement for a musical genre.

“The music is a character definitely, an important character,” McDowell says. ”But [the story is] really more about the politics [within the orchestra], the love, the sex.” He pauses. “Love, sex and classical music… that’s exactly the ad they ran for Clockwork Orange 45 years ago. I’ve come full circle.”

Actress Lola Kirke, as the young oboist Hailey Rutledge, ushers the audience into this unfamiliar universe. Hailey auditions for the orchestra, ends up being hired as Rodrigo’s assistant and soon discovers she’s not in Kansas anymore.

“Hailey is treading this line of ‘How can I be an artist, yet still make a living in the modern world?’” Kirke says over an Aperol spritz the next day. “It’s an incredibly difficult thing to do, especially in America, where it’s not easy to be an artist.

"But this season we see her becoming more confident, even to the point where she starts pursuing conducting herself. Hailey’s journey as a young artist is one that could be related to by lots of younger people.” And while Hailey embarks on her journey, McDowell notes that his character is approaching the end of his own.

“What’s interesting about Thomas is that he is a sort of study in aging,” McDowell observes. “But emotionally he’s a child. He’s been brown-nosed and called Maestro for 40 years, and everybody loves him.

"When things start to go a little wrong in his life, he’s thoroughly pissed about it, and you can understand why. That’s where the comedy comes from, but there’s also a tragedy in there. When a young man comes in who is brilliant and takes over, you’re always looking over your shoulder.

"That’s true as an actor, too. But then you get to a place when you’re so old that really you don’t give a f—k anymore. That’s where I am right now.”

Mozart differs from other TV fare not just by its subject matter, but by its approach, which is as unpredictable and nimble as a Lang Lang cadenza.

“The series offers a window into this world,” Lewis says, “and it, along with our series Red Oaks, resemble nothing else on TV, from the worlds [they inhabit] to tone to execution. These series are unique and risky — which are prerequisites to being an Amazon series — and we see viewers devouring them, bingeing on the whole series at once, often in a single sitting.”

Bernal credits Amazon with Mozart ’s avoidance of formula.

“Most TV shows are very rational,” the actor says. “They are about a murder that needs to be solved, and they leave you with a cliffhanger at the end of every episode.

We’re not doing that here. We are portraying a group of characters who love performing music. There is no rational argument about why they do that.

“We would never have built these original characters if we had had to deal with a formula,” he continues. “We started with basic characters and were then able to add our own complexity to them. Without that freedom, we wouldn’t have got to where we are today. Amazon is breaking the mold. It’s a great privilege to have the creative freedom they give us.

McDowell, who has seen more than his share of TV and films across a half-century career, agrees, saying that Amazon’s laissez-faire approach has paid dividends.

“I think what they must have decided was to go for really A-list people they could trust artistically. If you’re going to hire A-list people, trust them to do it. A lot of studios talk about doing that, but Amazon has done that. They put their money where their mouth is.”

With that, he points to the proof: through the window of the Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti, the string quartet can be seen tuning up on the barge, and Domingo is preparing to sing.


This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 10, 2016

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