So Paavo Jarvi made a pretty incendiary claim the other day that conducting is a vanishing profession because the technique of conducting is disappearing.
I found that quote depressingly narcissistic. Jarvi should know better. He's about as great a musician as you can be while still being an irresponsible jet-setter. The amount of orchestras he's blown through is pretty stunning: Cincinnati, Frankfurt, NHK Tokyo, Paris, Zurich, and now the London Philharmonic for what doubtless will be less than ten years. His only real loyalty? The chamber orchestra in Bremen, which he's now been with for twenty-two years.
I think a guy like Jarvi has an unrealistic expectation of what conducting technique can do for you. He is the son of Neeme Jarvi, probably the podium musician with the largest repertoire in the history of conducting. His whole childhood was on the ground tutoring by a well-known teacher. Hardly anybody gets mentorship that good, and it shows.
This quote was especially interesting because Jarvi himself said in the past that the great conductors got results without technique. Surely many of them did, we can all make our own lists of who they were. In some cases, the best results were gotten from yelling and firing, but many of the conductors who inspired the greatest fear: Reiner, Szell, Leinsdorf etc., were supertechnicians who could just as easily have communicated what they wanted through body language.
Technique in conducting is a very important thing unless you've got a cushy position where you can get more than 8 hours of rehearsal for a short program. The mere mortals have to get results and get them fast.
But that said, there are only so many results you'll get if all you learn is technique. There is a 'conductor culture' in music that is no less offensive in its empty headedness as those of piano and voice. We all know the types, and I've described them many times before: good hair, Brooks Brothers clothing, lecturing musicians on music history and inevitably getting details wrong, able to communicate nearly anything in body language but having nothing to communicate. Everybody in classical music has played or sung under at least a half-dozen of them, and the putrid smell of their batons offends me.
I grew up with music critics in New York and Los Angeles extolling the younger generation of American conductors and bemoaning that nobody hired them. I could only bemoan how backward the orchestras seemed, but then I heard them: not even necessarily Marin Alsop, she's one of the better ones, so was/is Kent Nagano, but then you have David Robertson, Robert Spano, Alan Gilbert, Hugh Wolff. On paper they all look amazing: they play all kinds of music the Masurs and Sawallisches would never touch, but when you hear how they play them, you wonder if they have any insight into this music at all. They play it with the same corporate boardroom modernism you got from James Levine, but Levine, for all his faults both personal and musical, was a towering musician whom even in his limitations managed to exhibit enormous understanding architecture, balance, harmony, color and rhythmic excitement. What you have from many of the others is the brutalism of Levine and Solti without their musical intelligence or sensitivity, and this is hardly limited to American podium musicians.
Some of them, the more interesting and less fashion conscious among them, are very good at getting performances of new music. And indeed, 20th century music has never been performed better than it is in this era: not just the later stuff, but Stravinsky, Bartok, 2VS, Ives, even Ravel; and even if the greatest performances of Shostakovich and Prokofiev were probably in the Soviet Union, the standard of performance in the West is unfathomably higher than it was fifty years ago.
Make no mistake, there is still a lot worth going to the concert hall for, but at this point, we have nearly lost the grand tradition, and nothing is more to blame for that than the cult of the conducting program where they ask you to say from memory what the 2nd clarinet is doing in bar 534, but never teach what is a properly placed second beat in a Viennese Waltz.
I have often speculated (and I could be very wrong) that many conducting teachers went into teaching because they were too difficult to have careers on the concert circuit. But somehow, we all hear from certain alleged conducting gurus every opinion they have about music, but nothing about the music itself or how to develop your own musical voice. In this way, conducting teachers are no different than any other conservatory teacher. So many would sooner squelch the individuality of their student than let them experiment with a musical idea that contravenes their deeply held beliefs of what music should be, rather than what music CAN be. Hearing and reading the interpersonal difficulty of many conservatory teachers, I find it extraordinarily difficult to believe they are sensitive to the individuality of their students.
The end result of this is that the students who leave the programs who still want a big career are often not the most interesting ones. The interesting ones quit in frustration, and hopefully they find meaningful work elsewhere, but that's in no way guaranteed. Whether conductor, composer, singer or instrumentalist, it's often not the ones who have something to say who make it, it's the ones who regurgitate the information. They're often the musical equivalent to grad students in universities who get academic careers because they simply regurgitate their professors' jargon. This pipeline empties music of its meaning and creates a culture of empty suits, so you can't be surprised when musicians want to face podium musicians who have atypical training.
Look, for a moment, at a sampling of the orchestral musicians who've made the switch: Gabor Takacs-Nagy, Roberto Gonzalez-Monjas, John Storgards, Cristian Macelaru, Sakari Oramo, Thomas Hengelbrock: these are just the concertmasters... With the exception of Jaap van Zweden, they show more musical sensitivity in their tiny pinkies than a lot of podium musicians do in their phallic batons (we'll ultimately see about Macelaru but I'm quite optimistic). Rank and file orchestral musicians who've made the switch? Manfred Honeck, Thierry Fischer, Petr Popelka, Osmo Vanska, Gustavo Gimeno, Susanna Malkki, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Karlheinz Steffens, Andris Nelsons (I still hold out hope...). Except for Steffens, not a one of these musicians is an obvious technical mediocrity up there. I don't love all of these conductors (and have a particular antipathy to Zweden), but in their earlier years, they had a week after week observation post to see what works, and let's face it, veteran orchestral musicians know the music at least as well as the conductor does.
Now, if Jarvi was talking about soloists making the switch then... yes, it's a problem, but it's not nearly as big a problem as he makes out. How many soloists have ultimately made much of a switch rather than a moonlight? Nathalie Stutzmann, Barbara Hannigan is beginning to, Nikolai Znaider has done so on the violin, Mikhail Pletnev on the piano, I guess you might count Barenboim and Eschenbach but they both certainly studied it: Barenboim with no less than Igor Markevitch.
But fortunately, this is mostly a part time phenomenon. Nevertheless, we've all seen examples of the soloist to conductor pipeline, and it's generally pretty embarrassing. No soloists' force of personality will stop the injustice of an orchestra paying massive fees to a figure only for the concertmaster to secretly direct the whole thing.
But personally, I think the orchestra musician to conductor pipeline is a good development 90% of the time. The fact is, I would rather hear all these musicians I just mentioned than a sampling of supposedly great conductors around the world taken at random who went through conservatory programs. I think musicians who've spent lots of time making actual music have more ideas, have better ideas, and previously lived a real life. A life where you see the same friends and musicians every week, where you have some leisure time at home to think hard about what music is, to work on the chamber repertoire with the same musicians and live a somewhat cultured life that doesn't involve going from hotel to hotel with no stimulation or friends you see regularly.
But there is one place where it's generally not a great development.
Historically Informed Performance, which has colonized so much music before Beethoven and imposed itself on orchestras who are not organized to do HIP correctly either from their training, or their size, or their concert halls. The biggest problem is not even that, it's that most of the HIP conductors are plainly not up to the task of retraining orchestras in the new musical style. We've all been at a performance that was clearly an embarrassment that the orchestra got through with white knuckles. It is neither pleasing to the ear nor the eye. They insist on tempi that make it nearly impossible for instruments to hear each other in concert halls that were designed for later music. You would think that with challenges like that, orchestras would take more care with whom they hire, but then traditional orchestras face conductors like Norrington, Antonioni, McGegan, who are clearly underqualified to elicit what they wish to hear. A dangerously fast tempo will decrease like air in a balloon, and pretty soon everything is at the same comfortable pace as everything else, but with very little detail to make it of interest in any other way. It's an unfortunate trait in performance everywhere. There are plenty of good conductors who have this problem, but at least when Manfred Honeck has it, you know that he's got 100 other ideas you can listen to.
The whole lifestyle of conducting is toxic, and toxic lifestyles can either attract toxic people or make people toxic. Even now in our depleted age, a conductor has very little accountability. Unlike a soloist or even a chamber musician, it's not obvious whether or not a conductor is competent, and they often have 100 musicians to cover for them.
But I wouldn't hesitate to trade 25% of a conductor's technical competence for 25% more ideas and expression and general cultural knowledge. We have hundreds, maybe thousands, who can guide musicians through the most complicated music like a schematic manual. What they can't do is express why we should listen.
Some of you may have noticed that I try not to use the term 'conductor' anymore. It's one of those terms that gives far too much power to the recipient. It implies an electricity that in reality is often not there, neurological directives that in reality are often mis-coordinated. I much prefer the term 'podium musician' because it shows that conducting has real responsibilities that are more important than its privileges.
So yeah. I love a lot of Paavo Jarvi's musicianship, but he is an example of how the problem gets whitewashed. Jarvi is as good as it gets when you aren't a serious podium artist. Serious artists stay in the same place, work with the same musicians, establish bases where new composers can reliably be performed, develop interpretations with the same musicians over decades, and leave organizations demonstrably better than they found them. Jarvi is able to get astonishing results, but he gets it with an astonishing podium technique, but in his case, technique is a form of coasting. Paavo Jarvi should be as good as Kirill Petrenko, but he's not in that league, and he's not because he's not nearly as serious an artist, and if he thinks conducting is a profession defined by its technique more than its repertoire, he is not as good as I thought.
Most conductors don't have his bildung and couldn't possibly get it. Conducting, particularly the way he does it, is not a noble profession. It's a profession where you can go from town to town, do the same pieces and pick up a check. Nothing lasting gets built, no bonds are made, and music just becomes another industry that a privileged few get to exploit.
Here is my choice for the greatest podium musician who used to be an orchestral musician.
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