‘Mozart’ gets personal in masterful 4th season
Professional, private lives run counterpoint in remarkable symphony of relationships
I have to admit, if anyone had told me I’d be reviewing the fourth season of “Mozart in the Jungle,” I would have suggested psychotherapy.
The comedy-drama is set in the world of classical music; the main characters are a young Mexican conductor and members of the fictional New York Symphony, including a young oboe player; and the show features guest stars like Caroline Shaw, John Cameron Mitchell, Pablo Heras-Casado and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Well, his ghost, anyway.
Not exactly what you’d call the makings of a hit show. But the series, whose delicious fourth season is available on Amazon Prime on Friday, Feb. 16, has succeeded not in spite of its quirky creative choices, but entirely because of
NMozart in the Jungle:
Comedy-drama. Fourth season available on Amazon Prime on Friday, Feb. 16. them.
The series was created by Alex Timbers and cousins Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, and is based on the memoir by oboist Blair Tindall. Like real-life symphonies, the New York is facing financial challenges and the challenge of how to get younger butts into seats. With conductor Thomas Pembridge (Malcolm McDowell) moving to emeritus status, the orchestra’s president, Gloria Windsor (Bernadette Peters),
hires a Mexican hotshot named Rodrigo de Souza (Gael García Bernal). The set-up is clearly inspired by the Los Angeles Philharmonic hiring Venezuelan hotshot Gustavo Dudamel a few years ago. Dudamel made a guest appearance in season two.
Over the past three seasons, we’ve gotten to know all the characters and their complicated relationships, none more complicated than that of Rodrigo and oboist Hailey Rutledge (Lola Kirke) who has gone from the maestro’s assistant and substitute orchestra member to Rodrigo’s girlfriend and an aspiring conductor.
In many ways, the fourth season is the series’ most personal yet, as it focuses on relationships — not only that of Rodrigo and Hailey, but also Gloria and Thomas. Inevitably, the confluence of personal and professional issues poses significant challenges. Hailey wants to prove herself on her own, not just because she is in Rodrigo’s “orbit.” He wants her to succeed and can’t help intruding on her game plan. Hailey forms her own ensemble and launches a campaign to get the rights to premiere a piece by modernist composer Shaw.
Pembridge takes the baton of a small, struggling orchestra in Queens that performs in the supertrendy National Sawdust complex in Brooklyn. He finds himself competing with Gloria for the rights to a new work by an eccentric composer (Bruce Davison). Their battles are fierce and often lead to sex.
At the same time, each member of this quartet is exploring new personal or professional moves. Rodrigo falls in with a hilariously self-serious postmodern choreographer named Egon (Mitchell) who creates dance for absent audiences. He wants to do a Faust dance piece with Rodrigo, who, meanwhile, is under pressure to perform the Mozart Requiem at the request of the Symphony’s new deeppockets named Fukumoto (Masi Oka). Rodrigo is uncharacteristically daunted because the ghost of Mozart has abandoned him.
Pembridge has his new gig and wants to take his relationship with Gloria to a different place. Gloria, meanwhile, is considering a major professional move.
All of this swirls in the context of a kind of magical realist dream. It’s not just the occasional dead composers who show up — not to mention Fanny Mendelssohn — it’s the ever-present awareness of the synapse linking the world of art and the real world. The thematic base of the fourth season is delivered most directly in the last of the season’s 10 episodes.
Four seasons in is when you’d expect a series to jump the shark — or, in this case, the “sharp” — but the writers have been jumping sharks, real and imagined, all along. This time, the season ends with more than one cliff-hanger. It’s probably the one unnecessary element in the entire season: We don’t need another reason to count the days till season five.
David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle. Follow him on Facebook. Email: dwiegand@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV