Why Are Pianists Better Musicians than Conductors?

I've obviously been listening to a lot of piano music lately, and the more I listen, the more I realize that among the greatest pianists we hear a level of musicianship that we almost never get from the greatest orchestral conductors. Rubato, agogics, shading, phrasing, rhythmic emphasis, it's always tied to the phrase, the harmonic changes, the phrase lengths, the pulse, the architecture of the piece. It's not as common in recent generations as it used to be. Many of today's romantics are putting these affectations all over the place without reason, while many classicists think no ideas at all are a substitute for making the work come alive. But the whole antiromantic movement happened because there was plenty of excessive affectation in the romantic era too.

Part of the problem is that for all the talk of conductors being in control, orchestral music is inherently collaborative. Conductors depend on their musicians, and unless the conductor wants to drain the inspiration from the musicians through excessive instructions, there are only so many demands one can make unless you're working with the same musicians on the same piece every other year for twenty-five years. Soloists have as much time to hone their interpretations as there are days in a year. Conductors can spend years preparing, but ultimately they have about three hours.

Music is so hard. Composing music still harder, but at least composers are thought of inherently as great artists. It's entirely deserved, but the question remains, are the greatest performers great artists?

I'm probably the wrong person to answer this question since my thoughts about what constitute great art are so atypical. It's not enough to make us feel imposed, to 'wow' us, even with sublimity. There has to be a human, heart-to-heart experience that makes us feel the entirety of existence's tragicomic state.

I feel as though I get that from an enormous amount of pianists, I do not get that from an enormous amount of conductors.

I have a sad feeling I know why that is. Conducting is not a profession that lends itself to great humanity. There are great humans in this profession, like my choir's conductor, Brian, who is now a member of this group, everybody say hi! But many conductors are in it more to impress the audience than to move them. They create their interpretations as much by their galvanizing force as any musical insight, and that's reflected in the performances. Impressed we duly are, but cleansed of our emotional anguish we too often don't feel.

With too few exceptions, orchestral music is just not intimate enough to make us leave the concert hall with a lower emotional temperature, and as you get older, you need that more and more if you want to live longer. Thrills are great for being young, and thrills can still be great as we age, but man does not live by thrills alone. As magnificent as Beethoven's 9th is, it can only get you so far before you need op. 111 or the Heiliger Dankgesang.

The greatest artists, I say again and again, combine polar opposites: tragedy and comedy, down-to-earthness and spirituality, angelic warmth and demonic fire and ice, grandeur and intimacy, moderating classic proportions with romantic extremes of expression. They may take you to extremes, sometimes opposite extremes, but they always lead you back home.

This is not the way of Toscanini or Furtwangler, nor Karajan and Bernstein. Of the four, I'll definitely take Lenny, but these are not artists you look to for particularly intimate experiences. Lenny may be intimate at times, art in its ideal state goes back and forth between intimacy and grandeur with us never knowing which side it will end up. Lenny generally deals in primary emotions. In Lenny's world as a conductor, everything is what it sounds like, happy is happy, sad is sad, anger is anger, and love is love (this, btw, is nothing like his compositions, which are full of that multi-dimensional irony). I compare him to contemporaries like Kubelik and Fricsay, even Gunter Wand, and none of those three throw their listeners so headlong into such obvious emotional states. They all make us feel the emotions, but they always 'leave a little in the tank' so we can understand that we have to feel every emotion in the context of the emotion that comes next.

That journey is ultimately what I look for in art. All things balanced by their opposites. Are the great recreative musicians the equivalent of Mozart and Beethoven? Of course not, but they work just as hard at their particular profession, and they are able to achieve all their aspirations. If that's not great artistry, what is?

Must be deceased or retired: