Mini-Cast #7: What Does a Great Conductor Do? - First Two Thirdsish

It's one of the hardest passages for a conductor. Near the end of the first movement of Bruckner's seventh symphony, which I've often imagined to be a depiction of heaven - the divine light, the play of the angels and cherubs on clouds, the ascension of the virtuous newly deceased for their welcome to eternity.

It's almost impossible to hear properly on a recording, but getting this right in concert is the difference between noise and an array of musical colors that few other pieces could ever release. As the soul ascends toward God himself, the music of the strings and high winds ascends in tones higher, and higher, and higher, in the kind of longing and ecstasy that is Bruckner's alone among musicians. And in order to get a sense of just how high we have soared, the double basses and timpani intones a pedal point E in their lowest octave - as if to show how distant earth is from heaven.

But in most performances, you can't hear that low-E. Double bass is a very quiet instrument, and if a timpani roll gets too loud, it just sounds like distortion. And yet in the performance I heard on Saturday night, the low-E was as pellucid as a triangle, yet the basses were not even playing. It must have been played by the tuba, though I couldn't see the tuba player from my seat. The conductor, Marek Janowski, must have rescored it, and it must be a ferociously difficult note for a tuba to play for so long, but orchestral musicians have much better technique today than they did in Bruckner's day. For anyone who knows basic orchestration, this solution should be obvious, and yet I'm not aware anybody had ever thought of it.

Nearly three years ago, I heard the legendary Daniel Barenboim conduct a performance of this symphony that was magnificent, but this particular moment dissolved in gibberish. Barenboim is a master of phrasing and sound and context, but he's no master of technique. But Marek Janowski is such a master craftsman that he thought of a solution better than any thought up by Bruckner, or perhaps any other conductor. This is the kind of thing a true maestro knows how to do.

Every concertgoer has asked this question for two hundred years: what does a conductor do? The answer is not so easy, because the job description of a conductor is so nebulous that a conductor can pretty much make up his job as he goes along. Think of it as a baseball manager or football coach, the low-key way that Joe Torre managed a team was almost the opposite of the high-octane intensity of Tony La-Russa. Both managers clearly were extremely successful, but their success depended on the responsiveness of the players they faced. Some workers are more motivated by bosses who let them figure things out for themselves, other workers require a boss who corrects their every move. Everybody is different, and success depends upon the organization's culture, and the director's ability to read the kind of boss their players require for the best results.

I was not a normal kid. During the two or three years of my childhood when I didn't long to be an orchestra conductor, I dreamed of being a baseball manager. As I got older, the more similarities there seemed between these two childhood obsessions. For better or worse, the performing arts have about the same success rate as baseball. Just as with batting averages, even the elite among musicians and actors will only get a hit 3 out of 10 times, and will only hit a home run one in fifteen times. Nobody

The recreative artists who give the greatest appearance of success, like Carlos Kleiber or Daniel Day-Lewis, can only do so in artificial circumstances. They're so selective about their projects that there's no true sample size to their work.