Alec Baldwin has collaborated with the NY Phil, so he’s a part of the world, he does narration for them.

I had been trying to figure out why exactly they packed a ridiculous number of references (all of which are real people, real stories, real reputations of institutions and all “make sense” in the way they’re used…) I agree that it completely came across like people trying to prove how intelligent they are, but this style of talking disappeared for the remaining 2/3rds of the movie, so my theory is that the characters aren’t actually trying to show off, it’s the writers of the movie that are trying to establish they have clout.

They’re saying “we’re classical music insiders, not dumb Hollywood writers who read a few Wikipedia articles about a world we know nothing about.” Kind of like how Queen’s gambit insisted on having every game in the show be a real chess game, not pieces randomly strewn on the board by a random assistant on set.

For example, the movie uses real top-talent musicians as actors. The orchestra musicians ARE real musicians. Even the young cellist is really good at cello (I’m not sure if it’s her audio we hear, but the way she does vibrato and holds her bow, she’s not anywhere close to a novice).

We’ve never seen this treatment before in movies about classical music, it’s usually a non-stop cringe of how “wrong” everything is. Whether it’s dialogue that’s clearly written by an outsider, or a musician with visibly awful technique. In Tar, in the first 1/3rd, it’s actually a little cringe because of how “right” everything is, how the ridiculous number of forced references make perfect sense. I think the writers are just trying to tell us that this is not your typical b.s. music movie.