Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.classica
Titolo: New Yorker sulla direzione (video)

L'articolo del new yorker del 21 agosto e' interessante, non l'ho
trovato online ma continuero a cercarlo
per ora questo video (e' in inglese)
http://www.newyorker.com/videos/060821onvi_video_conduct

trovato!
interessante il confronto tra Mazeel e Masur.
(Originally published in The New Yorker. Compilation copyright (c) 2006
The Conde Nast Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
The American conductor Robert Spano raised his eyebrows and his baton,
and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra dug into a smoky, "Bolero"-like
dance. He was nearing the end of two tense and fatiguing days of
recording a new opera, "Ainadamar," in the orchestra's concert hall, a
half-buried concrete box. The base of his spine twitched to the beat,
as if jolts of current were running through it. He grinned at the
cellos, giving them a quick thumbs-up, and cued the trumpets by
pretending to flick a cigarette butt at them.
When the music stopped, his body kept going. In the seconds before the
next take, he accompanied his instructions to the players with a rapid
series of gesticulations that even a musician sitting out of earshot
could have understood. He made as if to squeeze an orange. (The
message: "Give me a succulent tone." ) He then mimed sliding a toy car
down a ramp ("But don't drag; push right into the next beat"), whisking
eggs ("Keep the sound vibrant"), and swatting a Ping-Pong ball ("Give
the phrase a sharp, light bounce").
A white telephone next to his podium rang, and Spano listened as the
opera's composer, Osvaldo Golijov, dictated some changes in the score.
Golijov, along with a producer and a few engineers, was sitting in a
windowless room backstage, linked to the auditorium by speakers and a
TV monitor. "We've never done it that way before, but O.K.," Spano said
amiably; a decade of working with Golijov has taught him that a new
piece of his is not a fixed object. The conductor hung up and instantly
translated Golijov's comments into a command. "A little more schmeary,"
he told the violins, dragging his open palm through the air, as if he
were slathering a dozen bagels with cream cheese. When the red "Record"
light, suspended above the orchestra, turned on, the dance instantly
became more fluid, the melody sexier: less clop, more sway.
Spano is a small, perpetually quivering man of forty-five, with
wire-rimmed glasses, a crescent of hair at the back of his head, and
the searing gaze once cultivated by Weimar intellectuals. Spending time
with him is both invigorating and exhausting. When he can bring himself
to sit down, his leg bounces; his speech careers between erudition and
profanity. "Fuck you very large" is one of his favorite expressions,
and after using it he is apt to burst into hacking guffaws.
On the podium, Spano marshals this jerky urgency and uses it to kindle
the orchestra. "Each conductor enters the music through some key
technique," Bruce Kenney, a horn player, told me. "Some conductors are
happy when we play together and in tune--precision comes first. Other
conductors base their interpretation on the pacing, the tempo, and the
energy. Other conductors want a particular sound. Robert's an energy
guy."
I first met Spano a decade ago, after he had been appointed music
director of the tottering Brooklyn Philharmonic and gave one
performance after another in which rattling excitement overcame the
often scrappy playing. I particularly relished a rough but light-filled
performance of scenes from Olivier Messiaen's cathedral-like opera,
"Saint Francois d'Assise."
When the recording of "Ainadamar" was finished, Spano, whose coiled
alertness had never flagged, retreated to an underground suite with
Golijov, the soprano Dawn Upshaw, and a crowd of singers, Latin
percussionists, and orchestra administrators for some celebratory
drinking. Spano poured himself shots of vodka and playfully toasted his
colleagues. It took more than an hour for his adrenaline to ebb.
Even a merely competent conductor transmits a huge amount of musical
information instantaneously, accurately, and virtually wordlessly. How
quick or flexible the pulse should be, how biting a staccato, how
distended a pause, how graceful a phrase, how heavy a march--one person
with a stick channels this constant flow of minutiae to a hundred
players, talking only sparingly in rehearsal and not at all in concert.
It's a mysterious mechanism that allows this to happen, a gestural form
of communication that has no international semaphore. Each maestro has
a personal dialect: what one conductor achieves with a minuscule
vibration of a finger, another will accomplish with a sledgehammer
swing of an arm. From the audience's point of view, the process looks
wizardly. At eight o'clock on a Friday night, the maestro brandishes a
wand and summons rich strains of music, brimming with passion and
philosophy.
The conducting profession is less than two hundred years old. In the
eighteenth century, violinists or harpsichordists often led the
ensemble. In French opera, someone, frequently the composer, stood in
the wings and noisily kept time by striking the stage with a staff. (In
1687, Jean-Baptiste Lully died after he impaled his foot while
directing one of his compositions; the wound led to a fatal case of
gangrene.) In the nineteenth century, the orchestra leader stopped
producing any sound directly, and instead led by waving a rolled-up
sheet of paper or a violin bow.
The German composer Ludwig Spohr claimed to have introduced the baton
in 1820, and, in the ensuing decades, conductors transformed themselves
from bandleaders into artists. Felix Mendelssohn's combination of
musicianship and charisma turned him into one of the first celebrity
interpreters. Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner earned fame and money
on the podium even though their compositions were deemed suspect. By
the eighteen-eighties, the critic Eduard Hanslick was asserting that
the best conductors controlled every note and inflection emanating from
the musicians under their command. Hans von Bulow, he wrote, "conducts
the orchestra as if it were a little bell in his hand."
At its most basic level, conducting an orchestra involves indicating
how often the downbeat arrives, by tapping against the inner sides of
an imaginary box. For a four-beat measure, the baton bounces down,
left, right, up, and then down again, in an expansive sign of the
cross. A three-beat measure resembles another benediction: down for the
Father, right for the Son, up for the Holy Spirit.
Learning these movements is simple. But keeping time in a symphony is a
complex matter; not even a steady four-four pulse is straightforward.
In classical music, time behaves like a Slinky, stretching and
compressing without ever losing its shape. Played too strictly, the
most regular music would sound mechanical, but a tempo that is too
fluid and personal feels chaotic and self-indulgent. A great conductor
has a powerful internal sense of where each piece's natural limits
are--at what point a slowing of the tempo will edge from the expansive
into the grotesque, or how long a hesitation is needed before the
gallop to the final cadence. When James Levine conducts Wagner at the
Metropolitan Opera, he approaches the outer limits of slow. The effect,
when it works, is like staying in the pause at the top of a swing,
suspended between rapture and collapse. When it doesn't, it's like
squelching through mud.
The deftly wielded baton also shapes the music's character--whether,
for example, the strings should burrow into a deep Straussian shag or
the winds give off a gelid Stravinskyan glint. The American composer
and conductor Ingolf Dahl, who died in 1970, presented his students
with a precis of stick technique: moving the hand up and down produces
quick tempos and staccato articulation; moving it along a left-right
axis will naturally slow the tempo and soften the accents; pushing out
from the torso raises the volume; bringing the hands in toward the
armpits will turn it down.
James Conlon, an American conductor who spent nine years as the
principal conductor of the Paris Opera, told me that a maestro's
gestures fall into two groups, which might be described as "Get ready!"
and "Go!" The "ready" gestures indicate an imminent event, such as a
sudden acceleration, a surge in ferocity, or a harp glissando coming
after many minutes without so much as a plink. A conductor clumsy
enough to snap for an accented chord without preparing the orchestra is
likely to get only a sloppy, hectic blurt.
Such attempts to systematize the gestures of conducting are rare,
however. One of the standard textbooks, "The Grammar of Conducting: A
Comprehensive Guide to Baton Technique and Interpretation," by the late
Max Rudolf, downplays the physical aspects of the art. Rudolf offers
the following instructions on the first bar of Weber's opera "Der
Freischutz," in which the orchestra enters on a soft C and rumbles
toward a forte on the same note, one octave higher: "If the forearm has
sufficient intensity and the facial expression is convincing, you can
indicate the crescendo . . . with small baton gestures, even without
using the left hand."
The morning after the Atlanta recording session, Robert Spano led an
easygoing rehearsal for an all-Beethoven concert, then drove me to
lunch at the Colonnade, a roadside restaurant that he described as "a
cross between a nursing home and a gay bar." As he ate soggy fried
chicken and drank sweet iced tea, he looked as relaxed as he ever gets.
That week, he had just two subscription concerts. In the decade before
he joined the Atlanta Symphony, in 2001, he had no fixed address,
travelling constantly between guest performances in Europe and the
United States.
In a guest appearance, a maestro shows up for a first working session
on a Tuesday morning, leads another rehearsal or two on Wednesday, and
leaves Saturday night, right after the concert. The conductor must
develop an instant rapport with his players, since musicians ignore
messages they feel are wrong, irrelevant, or unclear. At that point,
the conductor isn't conducting at all; he is a helpless bystander.
"When I was younger and I was conducting new orchestras all the time, I
was terrified of screwing up," Spano said. "I went around with this
constant sense of discomfort: Are they going to like me? Now it doesn't
matter so much. Nobody's liked everywhere, and if I go to an orchestra
and it doesn't work I just won't come back, and I'll go somewhere
else."
A second category of conducting involves a relationship that takes
shape and settles over time. A music director and his orchestra develop
an old married couple's sensitivity to glances and signals. Several
years ago, I watched Levine, who has spent most of his adult life at
the Met, take his pit orchestra through a passage from Wagner's "Die
Walkure." Levine sat on a bar stool in the Met's basement rehearsal
room, grinning serenely and undemonstratively marking the beat. After
several minutes, he stopped, flipped back a few pages, and said,
"Horns, it should pop a little there." The same passage began again,
only this time the whole orchestra--especially the strings--sounded
bristling and febrile. Later, I asked him how he had managed to hinge a
metamorphosis on one detail, and he replied that the only way to
understand such a moment would be to know his thirty-year history with
the group, examine the way newer members interacted with veterans, and
grasp the relationship between that passage and every other score the
orchestra had recently been playing.
When I recounted the incident to Spano, he nodded. Levine's comment to
the horns, he said, was less important than the underlying message:
Watch me here. "People communicate much more by facial expressions and
body language than with words," Spano said. "When you first meet
someone, how is it that you know almost instantly whether you like that
person or not? It's about the face. So is conducting. I can communicate
an immense amount about how I feel about this music just by looking at
the musicians. I can command their attention by paying attention to
them. And then I don't have to do very much. If I want one person to
play one note louder, all I have to do is look at him and do this"--he
stared at me and crooked his finger in a tiny, summoning motion.
He went on, "You have to use the gesture that will elicit the right
response, not the gesture that shows what the music sounds like. For
example, if I'm doing Beethoven's Third Symphony, after the first two
big chords the violins and violas start their engines while the cellos
have a rather homespun tune. If I start conducting the cello melody,
then the dugga-dugga of the violins and violas is going to be a mess.
If I just keep a sharp, clear beat going, the violins and violas will
stay together and the cellos will take care of themselves." Once a
pattern is set, the conductor can ease off until it changes, like a
driver on cruise control. "I love doing nothing," Spano said, grinning.
"I love the feeling of the orchestra just going crazy and doing all
this fantastic stuff, and I'm just along for the ride."
Spano taught at Tanglewood for six years and has trained dozens of
aspiring maestros, but he has doubts about the effectiveness of
pedagogy. "I begin from the premise that this stuff can't be taught,"
he said. "That way, I feel less guilty for screwing people up. So I
keep focussed on the things that can be taught: how to make a clean
gesture, where to place a downbeat, how to study the music." Memorizing
the standard repertoire is a feat equivalent to learning by heart the
complete works of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Shaw, and most conductors
spend an enormous amount of time in solitude, poring over scores,
banging them out at the piano, disassembling them into harmonies,
melodic motifs, and structural diagrams, puzzling out why the composers
arranged those elements in the way they did.
Spano continued, "What I can't teach people, however, is intention. If
you have a clear intention, if the stereo inside your head is clicking
along and giving you something that's exactly what you want, then it
almost doesn't matter what you do with your hands."
A few weeks later, Spano stopped by my apartment, in New York, to watch
a DVD, "The Art of Conducting: Legendary Conductors of a Golden Era."
He had agreed to decode the performances of his forebears. "I feel like
a retired football player on ESPN calling the plays," he joked, as we
paused, rewound, and replayed a five-minute excerpt of Wilhelm
Furtwangler conducting Richard Strauss's rollicking tone poem "Till
Eulenspiegels Lustige Streiche," in 1950.
Furtwangler, with his gangly body, bald head, and expression of puzzled
seriousness, resembled a disoriented stork. To me, his regular beating
and the generic back-and-forth of his huge left hand did not look as if
they could possibly account for the molten sound pouring from the
Berlin Philharmonic.
"Ooh, that's fantastic," Spano said. "He's hot! He's got comic timing.
They feel his attention. When he looks to the woodwinds, they know
they're the foreground. I have to rethink this piece. He gets this
German beer-hall stupid kind of thing going, which is perfect for this
piece, and he got it not by shaping but by doing nothing and pulling
back the tempo just a bit so that it's thunk! thunk! thunk! " Spano
punched his palm to imitate the tread of boots on sawdust.
We skipped ahead to a segment from 1931, in which Willem Mengelberg led
the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam in the Hungarian march from
Berlioz's opera "La Damnation de Faust." Spano chuckled at the small,
wild-eyed, wild-haired Mengelberg, who resembled Gene Wilder,
frantically windmilling his arms. "He has an approach to this that's
sempre accelerando"--constant acceleration--"so he's got to make sure
that everyone's with him," Spano said. "He's paying attention to the
back of the orchestra, or they'll be late; that's why his arms are so
high. He's really working hard. If he were keeping a steady tempo, he
wouldn't have to work so hard. It's always about to come apart at any
moment, which is what makes it exciting. It must be so inspiring being
in a room with a hundred nervous people being led by a wack job! He's
obviously somewhat limited in technical ability, but I'm convinced
there's a lot coming out of his eyes."
"The Art of Conducting" opens with footage, from 1969, of Herbert von
Karajan leading the Berlin Philharmonic in a rehearsal of Strauss's
swaggering "Ein Heldenleben." Karajan, who died in 1989, was a
generation younger than Furtwangler and Mengelberg, and to watch him at
work was to see an art form acquire a newfound elegance. Compared with
Karajan, who had a cat burglar's grace, his precursors seemed murky and
spastic.
"Ein Heldenleben" begins with a leonine growl in the cellos and basses,
which Karajan released with a two-handed bouncing downbeat. He sat on a
bar stool, his left hand mostly parked on his knee while he drew the
baton through the air like a needle through velvet. When Karajan's left
arm did move, his whole body moved with it, leaning deeply into a plush
accent. "That chord is fantastic!" Spano said. "He doesn't want a
'bump'; he wants a whoomph-fff."
Karajan belonged to the first cohort of postwar conductors, and he and
Leonard Bernstein essentially invented the figure of the itinerant
super-maestro. Spano and I watched Bernstein at work, too, and we were
both struck by how disciplined and clear his movements were, despite
his tendency to dance at the podium. Why had the conductors who
ascended after the Second World War developed a technique that was so
much more specific and detailed than it had been before?
In the early twentieth century, imperial conductors had commanded a
repertoire that was often limited to a small coterie of composers, and
they frequently asked orchestra players to rehearse the same piece
dozens of times. A half century later, the musical canon had grown
dauntingly large and complex; moreover, a representative of the
musicians' union hovered at the conductor's elbow, making sure that
rehearsals didn't drag on too long. Meanwhile, the jet plane had made
it possible for maestros to drop in on orchestras in New York, London,
and Vienna in a single week, and orchestras were giving more concerts
each year. Musicians had to learn new music very quickly, and
rehearsals became brutally efficient. Bernstein, Karajan, and their
nomadic peers developed the conducting tools they needed to elicit
transcendence without wasting time. By the time the British conductor
Simon Rattle had taken over the Berlin Philharmonic, in 2002, that
orchestra (and most others like it) was expected to whip together
virtually any composition in a few rehearsals, under any capable
conductor, and be able to perform it with sterling accuracy.
Precise gestures produce precise sound, and the blossoming of technique
after the Second World War was accompanied by a musical fetish for
clarity. Pierre Boulez developed a fearsome gestural repertoire for
executing the hyper-complex rhythms of modern compositions, including
the ability to mark a different beat pattern with each hand. Boulez's
approach, which arose as a response to the specific demands of modern
compositions, soon spread to music of all periods, because it matched
the needs of the global music industry--the high-fidelity LP, for
example, captured every flaw in an orchestral performance.
The musical consequences of this trend have not been entirely salutary.
Furtwangler relied on degrees of vagueness, especially in Strauss,
where he regularly allowed the edges of a chord to bleed, and let the
waves of fast fiddle notes gurgle indistinctly. Nowadays a hazy
softness is judiciously applied in performance--Rattle does so
exquisitely in Debussy--but it has become a special effect. Rattle's
performance of "Ein Heldenleben" with the Berlin Philharmonic at
Carnegie Hall in January was full of precision-magnified detail. You
could make out the highlights on all those crystalline tremolos and
follow the curve of each dewdrop pizzicato. Modern conducting sometimes
feels like a glass skyscraper: initially thrilling, but finally
irritating, in its relentless sheen.
Some conductors have resisted this new era of corporate efficiency.
Spano and I watched the notoriously reluctant maestro Carlos Kleiber
leading the Vienna Philharmonic in Brahms's Second Symphony, in 1991.
Kleiber conducted rarely, but when he did he conjured an atmosphere of
bliss. His gestures were sporadic and vague; mainly, he leaned lovingly
toward the orchestra, seeming less like a leader than like an
enraptured listener. "This wouldn't work with any other orchestra in
the world," Spano said. "He's giving no rhythmic impulse whatsoever!
But he's getting this amazing line. It's glorious."
Teresa Marrin Nakra, a music professor at the College of New Jersey, in
Ewing, has spent a large part of her career attempting to prove that
even misty techniques for generating glory, such as Kleiber's, can be
plotted on a graph. A violinist in high school and an aspiring
conductor at Harvard, Nakra eventually decided that what she really
wanted to do was find out how conducting works. In 1994, she began a
master's program at the M.I.T. Media Lab; she finished her doctorate
six years later.
Nakra took as her starting point the work of the Austrian psychiatrist
Gerhart Harrer, who in the nineteen-seventies had fitted Karajan out
with sensors and measured his vital signs during a performance of
Beethoven's "Leonore" Overture No. 3. About halfway through the
overture, just where it reaches its emotional peak and veers into
minor, Karajan's heart rate leaped to a hundred and fifty beats per
minute--quite rapid for a man in his sixties. Karajan liked piloting
jets as well as orchestras; Harrer accompanied him to an airstrip,
hooked him up with electrodes, and asked him to perform some airborne
stunts. As Karajan dived toward earth, feinted toward a landing, and
then, at the last moment, pulled the plane's nose back into a climb,
the EKG needle hopped, but only gently. Beethoven had released a much
more powerful spurt of adrenaline than buzzing an airstrip had.
Harrer had shown that conducting can provoke physiological reactions
that mirror the emotional contours of a score. Nakra's goal was to
decode those physical events and translate them into software. She
wanted to develop a computer that could track a conductor's gestures.
"The Holy Grail of computer science is to capture the messy complexity
of the natural world and express it algorithmically," she told me.
"Music expression can be measured quantitatively."
At first, she tried building a digital baton, which relayed its
movements to a computer. But the tool was so packed with electronics
that it looked and felt like a truncheon. Next, Nakra lined a
body-hugging tunic with sensors--a "conductor's jacket," she called it
in her dissertation--and placed it on several Boston-area maestros.
"Conductors often shape the apparent viscosity of the air," she said.
"To get a string legato, they'll make it look like they're moving the
baton through molasses. So can we measure the muscle contraction in
such a way as to show that?"
Nakra has used her data to build various conducting simulators. One
installation has been making the rounds of children's museums: kids
conduct a video of the Boston Pops, and when they swing an electronic
baton faster the orchestra onscreen speeds up. She has built a digital
conducting lab for Arizona State University which allows students to
focus on technical problems by leading a synthetic ensemble. And she
has made some progress in codifying actions that conductors execute
without thinking. Leading up to a big fortissimo climax, conductors
often relax and do nothing for an instant before giving the cue--a
moment called "preparatory inhibition." Nakra also found that the
sensors could distinguish between a meaningful gesture and an
incidental movement: marking a beat produced regular spikes on a graph;
a hand turning a page of the score looked like a shapeless blot.
Nakra eventually concluded that mapping the significance and
effectiveness of conductors' movements is a lifelong project. "I
believe that the whole reason we have live music is because of this
great emotional, improvisational--but also planned--thing that's going
on," she said. "It's inherently unpredictable, but it also has to be
concrete. One human being is passing that information to another. If
we're going to eliminate E.S.P., then the mechanism must be visual.
Which means that we can at least observe it, so maybe we can measure
it."
If any conductor lends himself to scientific measurement, it would be
Lorin Maazel, the frighteningly competent music director of the New
York Philharmonic. Critics regularly express frustration with his
capricious interpretations, but nobody challenges his ability to get an
orchestra to produce any effect he desires. By slowing the baton's
passage through the air, he can stretch a melodic sigh and let it hang
there, until he cares to complete the thought. He can nudge a crescendo
with a twitch, and often seems to do so not from any deep musical
conviction but simply because he can.
On the morning after the Philharmonic's opening-night gala last fall,
the orchestra assembled on the stage of Avery Fisher Hall for its first
regular rehearsal of the season. At precisely ten o'clock, Maazel
ambled out to the podium. He muttered a perfunctory "Good morning," and
began leading the orchestra through Mahler's Symphony No. 1 without
even opening the score that sat on his music stand. His next words,
three-quarters of an hour later, were "Third bar of A, third movement."
The music started again. Maazel saw no need to voice corrections or
explanations. His gestures were economical, too. He quieted a grumble
of double-basses by waggling three fingers in front of his lips. His
eyebrows contracted, and the strings produced a rich, honeyed sound. A
moment later, the eyebrows lifted, and the tone became lyrical and
light. Just before a brass fusillade in the fourth movement, Maazel
glanced toward the back of the orchestra and cocked his left index
finger. At the appointed instant, he brought the digit down as if
flipping a switch, and the horns burst into a fearless fortissimo. The
rehearsal, though virtually flawless, had an oddly inert feel; it
seemed more like a collective limbering up than like a bout of artistic
labor.
A few days later, Maazel slouched in an armchair in his fourth-floor
studio, and said that it was important for rehearsals to be relaxing.
"I don't think that after a rehearsal of mine the musicians feel
exhausted," he said proudly. Maazel was a rare conducting prodigy--he
had led most of the major American orchestras by the age of fifteen.
Now, at seventy-six, he radiates ease and intuition in his profession:
for him, memorizing scores is effortless, and so is hearing that the
third bassoon's staccato has gone a little soft.
"It's always puzzled me why so many folks haven't learned to listen,"
he said. "It's very simple to learn, and, once you've learned it, you
have accomplished the first task of the conductor: to put the musician
at ease so that he knows where he's at and so that he's well integrated
into the total picture. That transforms the sound in a tenth of a
second from something that is amorphous, unfocussed, and uncertain into
a sound that is synchronized and together, because your musician,
having been put at ease, is then able to do what he does at home. He's
thinking of beauty of sound, breath control, phrasing."
He paused for a sixteenth-note rest before speaking again, in a tone
that mirrored his musical style: assured, decisive, slightly anodyne.
"Seven out of ten conductors--some very fine musicians--make motions
and choreograph the music but don't have a clue of how to put the
orchestra at ease, so that the musicians hunker down and don't look
anymore and fall back on their own resources, and you get a stodgy,
stiff sound." Productive serenity, he added, flows from the conductor's
own command of the score, and his ability to empathize with the
musicians.
"Conducting from memory is obviously important," he went on. "You're
dealing with a hundred musicians who are seated in front of you and you
get to know them by looking. You have a reel in your head of the
performance you're conducting, and every once in a while what you're
seeing doesn't match your reel. In two bars, the second trumpet is
supposed to play a passage and he hasn't raised his trumpet. A
conductor who's got his head in the score isn't going to catch that.
Even when people are counting their seventy-three measures of rest
correctly, there can be a doubt. Which is where cuing comes in. Take
the opening of Dvorak's 'New World' Symphony, and that brass chord that
so many people have trouble getting together. I become a brass player.
I'm integrated into the task that they have, which is puckering up and
blowing. I breathe, I don't move, and it's perfect."
For the members of the Philharmonic, Maazel's light-fingered virtuosity
represents a huge change from the style of his predecessor, Kurt Masur,
who communicated more with vague elbow-wagging and shoulder-shrugging
than with clear hand signals. What Masur could not suggest with
gestures, he extracted by force of personality. The Philharmonic was a
fractious place during Masur's tenure, from 1991 to 2002. Masur got
into fights with the administration, musicians grumbled, and the board
of directors finally nudged him out. (He now leads the Orchestre
National de France.) Many of the concerts Masur led were sluggish, but
he conjured some luminous Mendelssohn and fierce Shostakovich. The
remarkable performance of Brahms's "Ein Deutsches Requiem" that Masur
led nine days after the September 11th attacks was full of fluid warmth
and muted fire.
Glenn Dicterow, the Philharmonic's concertmaster, told me, "Masur never
gave up. He just worked and worked until he got it. Maazel has so much
control that he can do tempos on the fly. He rehearses less. He likes
to keep it fresh. It's an easier life."
Life with Masur was stressful partly because he saw his role in New
York as that of a spiritual leader, harnessing the mystical side of his
profession. This came out at disconcerting moments. Dicterow told me
that, early in Masur's relationship with the orchestra, he conducted
the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony simply by flinging out his
arms, as if he were a munificent potentate hurling doubloons. The
piece's first phrase is murderously difficult, because it starts with a
rest (it's not DA-da-da-DUM but GASP-da-da-da-DUM), and because the
pulse and the tension have to be established immediately. Dicterow
approached Masur during a break and asked if the maestro might mark an
extra beat, so the orchestra could figure out when to come in. Masur
refused, insisting that the pulse would materialize on its own. "You
must believe!" he pronounced. Astonishingly, Dicterow said, the gambit
worked: Masur shot his arms out again, and the orchestra, ready and on
edge, exploded. It's impossible to imagine Maazel taking that sort of
chance.
One reason that conducting the Philharmonic is so difficult is that the
orchestra members are as tetchy as they are gifted. Among the parade of
guest conductors who took over the Philharmonic last fall was Mikko
Franck, a Finn, who was only twenty-six at the time, and who conducted
sitting down, because of back problems. His first rehearsal began with
a Schnittke violin concerto. After a few run-throughs, a flutist asked
him which of two possible ways she should play an irregular rhythm. He
chose, and she answered testily that she hadn't been playing it that
way before--hadn't he noticed? The remark was an unmistakable challenge
to Franck's competence. "No, but that's how you'll do it now, right?"
he answered, with a soft smile. The fumes dissipated, and he swept on.
I have often heard it said that a guest has between two and five
minutes in which to earn the musicians' respect.
Later, the Philharmonic's principal cellist, Carter Brey, remarked that
Franck had been so deft, so clear, and so authoritative that the issue
of his age simply vanished. "The worst thing a young conductor can do
is to get up in front of the New York Philharmonic and say what an
honor it is to be here," Brey said. "Conductors have to project a very
great self-assurance. We have an innate sense of how the piece should
sound, we know how to make it sound natural, and we're ready at the
drop of the hat to jump in and do that if the conductor loses control.
There are conductors whom I've manipulated. I'll push a tempo or pull
it back, if I feel there's no intensity coming from the podium. I don't
have any patience with weak personalities."
The New World Symphony occupies a custard-colored Art Deco building in
Miami Beach. Eighteen years ago, when Lincoln Road was still a
dilapidated strip, Michael Tilson Thomas established the New World in a
former movie palace, as a training orchestra for recent conservatory
graduates. Now the orchestra is planning to trade up to a new home
nearby, which will be designed by Frank Gehry. Tilson Thomas puts in
several months a year here--roughly as much time as he spends with his
main conducting job, as the leader of the San Francisco Symphony. No
other orchestra in America is so identified with one man. Even his
poodles, Banda and Shayna, trot around the New World's stage with a
proprietary air.
The modern conductor's code of brevity--say just enough, but no
more--doesn't appeal to Tilson Thomas, who likes to exercise his
eloquence. At the New World, there are no union clock-watchers, and
Tilson Thomas indulges his fondness for elaborate metaphors and long
anecdotes. When I went to watch him in Miami, he was preparing a
performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, a sprawling chronicle
of the Battle of Leningrad. After the artillery-fired fury of the first
movement, the second opens with a muted, shell-shocked waltz. To
describe the shift in tone, Tilson Thomas intoned, "Meanwhile, in
Madame Rupenskaya's dance studio . . ." The joke elicited a respectful
chuckle. He then told his players a story about a Leningrad violinist
who during the Second World War spent a night of bombing crouched in a
toilet in the crumbling conservatory where he taught. A student went to
check on him the next morning and the teacher greeted him joyfully:
"I'm so glad to see you. I've just worked out the most wonderful
fingerings for the Balakirev Sonata!"
Tilson Thomas went on, "So you see, even in the middle of terrible
events people concentrate on very elegant things to preserve their
sanity." He stopped talking and began to conduct, gently coaxing a
ravaged, aristocratic lilt out of the players, who sat before him in
cargo shorts and flip-flops.
After the rehearsal, we crossed the street to Cafeteria, an
antiseptically chic restaurant throbbing with a synthesized soundtrack
of Mahler's Fifth Symphony laid over a world beat. For years, Tilson
Thomas had a reputation as a haughty and difficult colleague. But his
tenures in Miami and San Francisco have been content, and marked by a
sense of collective adventure. "My life changed when I finally accepted
that I was not giving the performance--the musicians are," he said.
"It's my purpose to help them shape, prioritize, and decide, so that at
the concert they can be as spontaneous and engaged as possible. The
more artistic the musicians are, the more you can work, not on the
little details but on the larger things. I once saw Charlie Chaplin
rehearse some actors, and he told one, 'Say that line as if you were
saying it.' He understood--it has to be the other guy's performance."
He continued, "In the past, most conductors modelled themselves on one
type of authority figure or another. You had the generals, the
professors, the high priests, and so on. For me, it's more like being a
coach or a director."
Tilson Thomas describes an orchestral performance as a fluid exchange
of ideas. The conductor establishes a tempo, a clarinettist bends it
expressively for a solo, and the conductor takes over again, allowing
an extra breath or two before bringing the other players back in.
Everyone needs to be prepared, alert, and flexible. "There are some
conductors who like to establish an exact template in rehearsal of what
the performance is going to sound like," Tilson Thomas said. "Then the
concert gets judged in terms of how good a reproduction it is. I don't
work that way. I feel that if a soloist does something a little
differently, I have to make that difference make sense, so the next
event will need to be a little different, too."
Later that day, Alberto Suarez, a horn player in the New World
Symphony, put it more succinctly: "A lot of conductors come in and they
interpret the piece for you. But great conductors interpret the piece
with you."
Tilson Thomas's collaborative ideal derives in part from contemporary
management fashions. If Mengelberg and his peers saw themselves as high
priests and Bernstein's generation aspired to be micromanaging auteurs,
then many of today's music directors cultivate the
khakis-and-shirtsleeves manner of a Silicon Valley C.E.O. In rehearsal,
Tilson Thomas doesn't scream or threaten; he makes requests, not
demands. He encourages orchestra members to call him by his first name,
rather than "maestro." He makes allowances for musicians' moods and
learns their children's names. Similarly, Spano--"Robert" to the
Atlanta rank and file--spends most of his workdays in a faded blue polo
shirt. James Levine oversees the Met and the Boston Symphony Orchestra
in sweatpants.
Tilson Thomas has found that bringing democracy to the orchestral
experience yields specific musical results. "There's a sense of
spaciousness that's created using that technique," he told me. His
open-ended interpretations with the San Francisco Symphony produce, at
their best, a cinematic illusion, a vivid sense of location. I still
remember a 1996 performance of Ives's "New England Holidays" Symphony,
at Carnegie Hall, in which the musicians' separate cameos each had a
distinct weight and gleam. In the "Washington's Birthday" movement, a
percussionist playing chimes summoned distant church bells tolling
across snowy fields. When the scene moved indoors, where polkas and
waltzes collided in the rafters of a great dance hall, it was a
violinist in the rear of the string section, and not the concertmaster,
who played the solo, so that the fiddler sawing out old folk tunes
seemed to be lurking in a dark corner. In Mahler symphonies, too,
Tilson Thomas nurtures this sense of independence, as if his players
were scattered on different peaks, communing across Alpine valleys.
During a crystalline performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony in San
Francisco last fall, I had the feeling that Tilson Thomas's flamboyant
physicality drew the players into his circle of experience and
signalled his gratitude for the way they played.
There is another reason that Tilson Thomas and his colleagues tend to
be less dictatorial than conductors in the past: these days, it's
easier to get rid of a music director than it is a rank-and-file
violinist. As James Conlon told me, "You cannot be arbitrary in your
dealing with the music or the players. You've got to govern by
consent." Even the most respected and businesslike conductors can have
trouble winning over a particular ensemble. When Marin Alsop, one of
the few women to reach the top ranks of her profession, was appointed
music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, in July of 2005,
some of the musicians voiced a rare public complaint. (They were
overruled.)
I asked Tilson Thomas what happens when a conductor and an orchestra
fail to connect. The smile on his long, vulpine face hardened slightly.
"It's amazing how mercurial, specific, and fragile the balance is in
the human interactions in orchestras," he said at last. "So many things
can change the way the feeling is. A lot of it has to do with how
confident everyone is in the first place, how comfortable they are with
the repertoire, with the acoustic, with one another. It has to do with
exactly which players are there according to the rotation."
He went on, "The difference between a veteran conductor and someone
inexperienced is that the veteran is able to hear more of what's going
on. You're thinking about yourself less and the music more. But if
you're nervous or disturbed by something nonmusical, if the conductor
senses tension, if he's not sure the musicians approve of him, or if
the musicians aren't sure they're being approved of, then the energy
can dissipate."
As I listened to Tilson Thomas try to describe the way bad feelings can
sabotage the music, I thought about what Clive Gillinson, the artistic
director of Carnegie Hall, had said to me a few days earlier: "People
forget what a lonely profession conducting is. You're up there by
yourself and you don't have anyone to tell you, 'You're talking too
much,' or 'You're not saying enough.' You have all these people looking
at you. And you don't really know what they're thinking."
This February, Robert Spano came to New York to face a conductor's
riskiest challenge: a world premiere. On four occasions, he led Dawn
Upshaw and the New York Philharmonic in a performance of John
Harbison's limpid "Milosz Songs," a setting of poems by Czeslaw Milosz,
featuring delicate interludes by harp and celesta. On the afternoon of
the final performance, Spano arrived at Avery Fisher Hall snuffling and
exhausted. He spent most of lunchtime staring at a box of take-out
sushi. I asked him how he felt about the new piece, now that he had
drawn it off the page, after weeks of study, and into the physical
world. "Right now, I'm totally committed to it," he answered. "Sometime
in the next couple of weeks, I'll know how I feel about it." He added,
"Our instinct is to react and form judgments very quickly, and with a
new piece one's understanding will change over time." When I heard
Harbison's work, it struck me as well wrought but overly polite;
Spano's performance, however, had deftly highlighted its strongest
quality--a kind of hushed prayerfulness.
I mentioned a couple of world premieres that I sometimes fantasized
about attending: Beethoven's Seventh; Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." I
wondered how clearly the first listeners and performers had perceived
the violent originality of those works, or understood that they were
hearing future classics.
"I have diminishing interest in posterity," Spano said. "I no longer
feel that the test of the value of something is time. What's much more
important is the power of a musical experience in a given moment. And
that can happen with a Paganini violin piece that most of us agree
shouldn't be called a masterpiece. I think of composers as setting up
possibilities, not creating objects. There's no such thing as
Beethoven's Seventh. It's only a hypothesis." Spano was silent for a
while, then he said, "Pieces of music are wormholes, which we can enter
to escape our normal experience of time."
Just then, a Philharmonic staffer came to call Spano to the stage for a
sound check. He jumped to his feet, instantly energized. I recalled
something he had told me earlier. "You have to invest in a piece's
greatness," he said of Harbison's work. "As far as I'm concerned, it is
a masterpiece until proven otherwise." Spano, grinning, hurried off to
the podium, carrying a briefcase full of scores with him.