What Does A Great Conductor Do? - Final Draft

(Play from where the link goes until hard cut at 19:33)

It's one of the hardest passages for a conductor. Near the end of the first movement of Bruckner's seventh symphony, a movement I've often imagined to be a depiction of heaven - the divine light, the play of angels on clouds, the ascension of the newly deceased to their reception into 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 the gates of St. Peter, 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 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 voice leading and context, but no one ever hailed him as a master of technique. Yet Marek Janowski is such a master craftsman that he thought of a solution better than any thought up by Bruckner and 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. In a lifetime, we all fail many more times than we succeed.

The recreative artists who give the appearance of universal 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 in their work.

Conducting is not a profession as rife with frauds as some allege, but there are many who are more mediocre than their reputations. A conductor great at every performance is a myth. Most good conductors, like any performer, have a couple dozen substantial works at most which they know well enough to excel, and everything else is a crapshoot.

And like in every profession, the best of all are almost never superstars. To be a superstar, you have to at least be good, but performers become superstars because they choose music that draws more attention to them than to the music. Yet music expresses so much more than sensory overload. I've heard Valery Gergiev give a Tchaikovsky 5 that could light up a whole city, and in the same concert he conducted Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture whose playing came so unglued I thought he'd stop the piece and start over. I've heard Yannick Nezet-Seguin give a Petrushka for the ages, but in subtler music like Bluebeard's Castle by Bartok, he exhibited no understanding of what makes the music compelling. I've heard Gustavo Dudamel do a Rite of Spring to wake up a continent and another Rite of Spring to put a city to sleep. The same was once true about Georg Solti and Herbert von Karajan. The really great ones, who are always studying more music as a matter of course and can find the music in the music of any time or place, rarely become household names in any country except for the week they guested at your local orchestra if you've got a particularly robust public for classical music in your town. They're too curious about great music to keep playing the flashy pieces that make you remember them more than the music they conducted, if you've grown to love orchestral music, chances are it's because there was a conductor made it sing and dance without even drawing attention tot he fact that he was doing it.

Occasionally you get a musical genius up there like Leonard Bernstein and Daniel Barenboim who can find the music in anything, but the nature of genius is that their brains work differently, and they can't always transmit their extraordinary understanding. On any given night, Lenny and Danny could be as risible as they were magnificent the night before. Is a conductor like Barenboim more valuable than a conductor like Marek Janowski, whose revelations are very subtle, but who never fails spectacularly?

Any kind of musician who gives a performance worthy of the music they're playing on more than one in three nights is the most exclusive of exclusive clubs, and in the history of the entire of the conducting profession, there are maybe twenty-five names. Some of those are names that if you followed the classical world from a distance you might have heard: Claudio Abbado, Mariss Jansons, Bruno Walter, Thomas Beecham, and (cough, ahem) James Levine, and some are only known and remembered by the concert faithful like Charles Munch, Charles Mackerras, Rafael Kubelik, Ernest Ansermet, Eduard van Beinum, Ferenc Fricsay, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Herbert Blomstedt, William Steinberg, Otmar Suitner, Igor Markevitch, Michael Gielen, Christoph von Dohnanyi, Paul Paray, Erich Kleiber... and perhaps the living names of five younger conductors who are less than ninety years old yet... And even those twenty-five names are not necessarily even the greatest, they are the great contact hitters - the ones who inspire great performances most often, but not necessarily the greatest performances. By my judgement, there is no higher 'batting-average' than Pierre Monteux, the Golden Age French conductor who could literally make great music from anything, but can I say with a clear conscience that he is a greater conductor than Wilhelm Furtwangler, the greatest home-run hitter in the profession's history who climbed and scaled to higher heights than any other maestro ever did? Of course not, there must be room on a list like this not only for Furtwangler, but other power hitters who strike out all the time too like Leonard Bernstein, Valery Gergiev, Dmitri Mitropoulos, Willem Mengelberg, Victor de Sabata, Simon Rattle, Nikolai Golovanov, Kirill Kondrashin, Neeme Jarvi, Leopold Stokowski, Yevgeny Svetlanov, Serge Koussevitzky, Klaus Tennstedt, Albert Coates, Yuri Temirkanov, John Barbirolli, Eugen Jochum, because when the Furtwanglers and Bernsteins were great, no one has ever been greater, even if they was too seldom at their greatest. And then, what do you do about a conductor like Carlos Kleiber, who in some ways cheated - he clearly got a hit at least one in two times he ever came to bat, but he conducted roughly 200 night in the last thirty years of his life, not even seven times a year, only conducted less than two dozen works, and almost always with the world's four or five greatest orchestras - it's like a hitter who spends all year preparing for the World Series, knowing that the best team will demand him, and that he can win the championship while only swooping in when it was time to claim the glory. So in short, what does a great conductor do? I

(go to the end of the movement and have this music play us out)

I have done a terrible job of answering the question. I answered it so much better in what was supposed to be today's podcast which was a tribute to the late Mariss Jansons, one of the very elite maestros of all time, it was friggin' great and then I accidentally deleted it more than half of it this morning without any chance of recovery, just before I tried to record it. So for the moment, what does a great conductor do? After more than thirty years of being fascinated by conductors and great classical performances, I still have no idea.