Conductors and conducting

conducting is about sex it's ritualistic it's um about animal instinct I love that moment when you're waiting in the hall from to come on that expectation is one of the most exciting feeling trouble is that most of the time they don't deliver you end up being disappointed I think it's all to do with power and probably a lot of money the problem is that most conductors don't seem to be that great and actually conducting it's got to be the world's most charlatans profession [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] great conductor knows how to galvanize his forces in such a way that the masterpiece comes alive it's the conductor who either pulls the reins or lets the orchestra play it's when to let them play and when to dominate them you know in you head what you want another question is what you have here how much you can put across to the musicians who regard you at the first moment a sort of strange hostile animal [Music] my work with conductors is based on some survey work which we did both in London orchestras and orchestras and the provinces to see what factors upset them and what factors improved their performance some 50 percents actually criticized the competence of the conductor and the comments were made were often over lurid and quite stunningly a critical type so that they were often described as being vicious or sadistic I think that a bad aggressive unhelpful conductor will always produce in players of feelings insecurity and nervousness in my case it's led to a nervous breakdown and I'm not the only one many of my orchestral colleagues are suffering in the same way they after day month after month I play for conductors who don't know some of the world's most famous music music which I've grown up word since I was a boy and I play in a well-known Symphony Orchestra so I'm not talking about little-known conductors I'm talking about really big names [Music] and what we're faced with is a worldwide crisis in conducting ask Claire's many of the better orchestras how many conductors they like working with how many they actually respect and the answer will be two three four maybe half a dozen at most which means that players in the best orchestras are spending most of their time working with conductors for whom they have no regard and times working with somebody they consider an absolute charlatan they're undoubtedly quite a few charlatans in conducting an orchestra can save the conductor which means that a charlatan can get up before them and they simply as we say in the profession pull down the window shape and they go and they do their thing irrespective of what the C n podium it's quite true a charlatan can endure this this profession and I suppose go quite far the actual education of conductors is not on the same level as as training of instrumentalists awesomest the amount of really good conductors is very limited and we don't have to go very far to end up having people conducting orchestras were actually inferior to the standard of good players [Music] ready train more than half an hour late didn't think I was going to make it why have you been in York afternoon symphony concert anything interesting no no just the usual stuff everybody's overture back melon off second concerto Beethoven's fifth who is conducting no idea didn't look I think there are about ten conductors in the world I would say these people earned the right to stand in front in front of the very first class office of the world I think there's about ten perhaps I might be pushed to name ten if I'm talking about Jascha Heifetz that is being a great violinist or the Berlin Philharmonic orgy up to the money toward Chicago has been a great officer and I'm talking about being pushed to name ten that leaves an awful lot of people who are somehow making unbelievable sums of money and unbelievable images public images and lifestyles from other people's art and blood in the United States alone there are 1500 orchestras 950 of them full-time professional orchestras are there 950 conductors capable of being able to stand on 950 podiums and create excitement to individual audiences no there is a kind of range of competence now which maybe 20 30 40 years ago and would not have existed I think people took for granted that a conductor when he was in an important position had risen to the top of the tree knew his job inside out but nowadays I think you find conductors emerging virtually from nowhere and suddenly landing big recording contracts and because of their big recording contracts jobs with major international orchestras the amazing thing about the London orchestras for they're all great orchestras is that they exist in a to the free market and anybody could come and conduct a London Orchestra if we had enough money to buy the orchestra's time I can remember being quite naughty the first time I came up against this and the trouble is when they get too big for the boots you know you're prepared to put up with it that when they start to have a have a good June is keeping one at the brass you know why don't you play with my beat why don't you play quicker and I said well you know well if you move your hands faster then you play quicker and not trying to be helpful of course everybody courts then you know he felt deflated and I got a telling off from the council you know this chaps worth quite a lot of money to us this week or so so on I mended my mended my ways [Music] I'm not a professional conductor my real profession is publishing magazines but some years ago I fell in love with Mahler's music and the music was the driving force which convinced me that I want to try to conduct this one piece of music it's the only work I conduct Mahler Second Symphony my sense is that many musicians are very dissatisfied with a problem of a lack of preparation by conductors and I really think this the interesting question to ask is how is it possible that some of the most famous conductors do not conduct Mahler very well it can't be lack of technique it can't be lack of skill can't be lack of musicality it can only be that they haven't done the adequate preparation that's conductors get away with not knowing the pieces well enough is simply because of the situation of the business at the moment - which Orchestra you ever come you always hear the same sentence we don't know who we should take as music director or as guest conductors there are too few really good people around and I think that's the reason why so many get away with it just now because the business has to go on [Music] the symphony orchestras and mausoleum for dead composers we're still playing pretty well the same music that was being played a hundred years ago and conductors as well as record companies are hyping it for all it's worth [Music] hundreds of conducting students attend music colleges every year few actually make it as conductance the ones that do tend to be white and the predominantly men I was working at the State Opera in Vienna and I was called up the night before a rehearsal and told that apado who I was assisting at the time was ill and that I'd have to take the rehearsal with the Vienna Philharmonic the following day so I looked at the score went into the Opera House the next day and was presented to the orchestra by the director of the Opera House I think that the orchestra wasn't really sure who I was and I believe they thought I was working in the archive as a kind of librarian of some sort so they were surprised that I was put forward to take the rehearsal and they talked a lot and giggles and this kind of thing but we started the rehearsal and after a couple of minutes someone said but she's really conducting and everybody settled down and it was fine it was a wonderful rehearsal in fact the great orchestras they play so wonderfully already on the first rehearsal and if the conductor has no personality and doesn't know which way he would like the orchestra play then comes some difficulties I think one of the biggest problems is that Orchestra players today are so very technically Ashura generally there is a great there's a greater problem for them in a sense if they're not inspired by a conductor and by the nature of the profession I think it has to be said the majority of performances that they give I think that they are terribly frustrated by conductors who don't communicate anything [Music] [Music] and I down [Music] I'm always inviting the rumored talent then ask the officer did you like him most of the time the answer is no and if the orchestra doesn't like the person I will not call him back even if the critics are good and he's not too expensive and etc and it's a real problem a conductor can pull the wool over everyone's eyes except perhaps the orchestra and if you're lucky some of the critics but the puppet doesn't necessarily care about intrinsic musical quality they're concerned about other factors and if the conductor is charismatic and flamboyant and has picturesque perspiration PR team fancy covers on recordings and on magazines you can bamboozle a large amount of the public for a very long time in a sense the popularization of classical music have occurred hand in hand with reduction in the number of available conductors and through the the desperate need of this huge number of orchestras and audiences and the managers to keep the business going to keep the ball rolling to keep the audience's coming in the stage filled and the concert being performed you need somebody up there waving a stick anybody [Music] [Music] to be a conductor first it helps to be able to read a score if you can read a score you then need to learn to beat time one-to-one and write if you can do that you then need to be able to use this arm independently of this arm so when you're going Adam did a tower with that one this one is shaping or molding a phrase you've then got to be able to know what's coming next you then finally got to be able to galvanize everybody underneath you so while this is going on and that's going on independently these are going on and they're watching for anything that might go wrong or anything that is going right and then if you could manage it on top of that to express in your face what you're feeling in your body then you're about ten percent along the road to become a conductor I'm always fascinated at the difference in technique that's employed by conductors if you take the extremes of somebody like Yan sands for instance who he has a wonderful clear technique and you can see what is communicating to the orchestra and something like ten steps is the absolute opposite he's got no technique at all that it works and if you could define it in a way you destroy the whole magical it [Music] conducting is a combination of emotion and technique music is emotion music is also a series of notes bound together according to a composers concept [Music] Leonard Bernstein's are very clear idea about what a conductor does at his best he could Electrify literally not only the orchestra to make the altar play better than they thought than you have you also elect to find audience you would make some kind of a closed circuit between the music himself players and the audience conducting is a kind of holy expression advanced and understood that music was created to express something the question is something being expressed that doesn't mean that you have the most beautiful pianissimo or that this is the fastest or the slowest ever it means that something is being expressed you know that's very rare because mostly in our period conducting most conductors are like fast Italian sports cars you know sexy fast loud and that's it you know a good ride but not really with a larger world of meaning and I think we really have to get past that point where the conductor has been venerated as this absurd overproduced over-promoted figure because you know frankly there are more important people in the room or equally important people in the room you know and it's really not time for us to be liberated from the the tyrant [Music] we are now paying the price for media hype in music which is a new phenomena starting really with Tuscany and going upwards or backwards how have you liked it since then Toscanini was actually one of the first real media experiments in big-time classical music promotion on the part of the National Broadcasting Company as you may notice Guinea was until 1936 the music director of the New York Philharmonic and then he retired David Sarnoff who was the chairman of RCA and RCA owned NBC at that time was a music lover himself and liked the idea of bringing back the most attractive public performer of classical music of that time and so his conducting was built up into this huge myth that there was nobody in the world like this man his personality lent itself to exploitation the mysterious the great maestro the temper that all the things that went with but he manipulated the media really didn't manipulate him he knew exactly who he was it was a born showman someone once asked me don't be something about those cunningly what was what was it made him so great well if you as a musician ask me that we could go into detail by taking a score and comparing when the layman asked me stat I say my answer is well Toscanini was worth being born for [Music] he was presented to the audience not only as this brilliant conductor the greatest of course but he was also presented in publicity as a regular guy it was said that in his off-duty hours later on he used to watch television all in wrestling he was a regular guy just like everyone else but happened also to be the greatest conductor he brought a kind of determined efficiency which exactly matched the American feeling of the time that is go getting mass production money-making enterprise culture Toscanini epitomized all these qualities in music so he was the ideal musician for the Americans at that time at the moment when Toscanini was at the summit of his fame and popularity at the end of the Second World War a British record producer called Walter Lake set off on a hairy lying type of manhunt to rummage among the ruins of the Third Reich for conducting talent that he could apply to a new Orchestra that he was forming in London the Philharmonia the man you found was Herbert ontari carrion was raised and molded during the Third Reich he was an enthusiastic early Nazi she was also conscious of the need to control media not just in the way that Gibble's had done in germany by total censorship but in the way that Toscanini had done in america by an orchestration of adulation when he later went into projecting his own image he was very careful to control all photographs that appeared of him not just on record covers but in newspapers as well he would always be backlit under lit as if by Laini riefenstahl in her film of the Nuremberg rallies when he started making films of himself he applied the same techniques the same lessons the same concentrations his idea of how to these films was to to build basically a monument to himself and when when one wondered and had the temerity to inquire you know who would be interested in these films he basically said people who were interested in becoming conductors and so if it was a 50 minute piece he was on the screen 40 minutes and there would be occasional shots of the rest of the orchestra and he would say you know oh no we don't want this guy he's ugly take the camera I'll take that out of here or the best soon he thought was an ugly instrument we don't want any bad soon shot and but basically the films that he was making were definitely a way to immortalize himself carry on was the sort of a marketing genius he lived for it he he had a very concentrated life he did not go all over the world just gasps conducting he did not I don't think even charge very high fees when he conducted but his main let's say obsession or purpose in life musical life was to propagate his electronic image [Music] [Applause] [Music] I went to the American documentation center in Berlin and I've got a Xerox of a card that was a party membership card that said Herbert von count on it I gave him the card because we've been talking about this and he'd been denying it and so I handed in the car and I remember he took it over and to a lamp and he held it over the lamp and he stuck his face in over the lamp with the light coming up and he hadn't shaved in a couple days and just relaxing at home and he looked at it and he said this is false this is false because there is no signature and for a while I thought that my whole case had been blown and then I discovered that one didn't need the Simon's card he was a great admirer of hillier he would say this you know to me he admired Hitler ty was a great state karien was a great conductor no no doubt he was a wonderful reverser and he was somebody who really could achieve things in a very short time and he had his certain kind of style but I don't think I in has ever been a Nazi I don't think he was not this kind of a person really to stand for something as stupid as not not ISM I don't think so but he used it in a way as he used later all the median things like that and that's the same way he used in the early days of course the political structure I mean these people were just opportunist carry on got his position in those days he never after that uttered a word of regret of sorrow for all those that suffered so much for all his colleagues I'm just speaking about his colleagues and the musicians for those that suffered for those that are persecuted for those they were killed and for those they were driven out and nobody minded the other all right he was an opportunist Oh but maybe these people that were killed they also wanted nothing else but to be in their profession and to go out they couldn't because they were killed so I can't really excuse opportunist so easily [Music] [Applause] [Music] the name quraían actually became is not only a symbol of of a godlike conductor but also Korean became a symbol of classical music orchestra music being available for people who didn't have direct access to concert music that they could go to the supermarket or the record store a bookstore and buy a few current recordings and any disrespect he did a lot of good but I think one of the problems of course is that now you have koreans name printed this big and then better finish printed this thing and of course it's bloody wrong conductors everywhere saw the power and the wealth that carry on amassed and so they too began to shift their priorities a little bit towards the sort of control they might have in the sort of lifestyle they might had if they emulated carry on and his activities when the focus of the attention of leading conductors is diverted from making music into making money then the profession as a whole is invariably weakened and the quality of music as we experience it is undermined many of our friends who stand on the folio and get paid more than an entire Orchestra I think that there's got to be something very loopy in the whole profession I can make anywhere from I don't know six to ten thousand dollars a night if I want depends on the particular orchestra depends on the relationship I've had with that Orchestra over the years again you if you appear many seasons running you just escalate your fear the agents do that goes up and it gets to a point when you've appeared 14 15 years in the orchestra you're making a good living Rostropovich has been paid several hundreds of thousands of dollars to conduct the National Symphony I was in Washington for four years at the National Endowment for the Arts and during that time I would say of all the performances of the National Symphony maybe two or three had sold out and the rescue could buy tickets up to the moment of the concert for whatever price range certainly when we hear that Lorin Maazel is being paid a tremendous amount of money for a very few weeks at in Pittsburgh there is a real question as to whether he is worth that money in the cases of the music director it's public knowledge how much they are in it the government will release those figures of a non-profit institution we can have access to them and we know that at the time when the orchestra is pleading poverty they are paying 50 billion zillion dollars to the genius on the podium and that may not be a useful bit of information but those are trying to raise funds [Music] those who are at the top of the profession are finally for the first time in history truly deriving benefit from the efforts because up until then the returns were rather extraordinary but they were going to the managers the agents the presenters thought to the itis Lorin Maazel according to US income tax returns for 1990 was earning nine hundred and eighty one thousand six hundred and two dollars as music director with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in addition he was negotiating a deal with Bavarian radio to conduct their orchestra in Munich for 14 weeks of the year he also guest conducts and makes many recordings what Lorin Maazel has done more than any other living conductor is raised the ante yet again after the publication of his deal with Bavarian radio the other conductor in Munich Sergio Chalabi dhakkir very revered figure demanded parity it was simply unthinkable that another conductor in town could be earning more than he was and so the bees and finances of conductors have continued to multiply even as their numbers have diminished I am in this profession for the love of the music not to earn money really the fact that I earn considerable among money is because I'm vain because why should I own less than so-and-so [Music] I'm certainly not the highest-paid from that not at all some of the fees that have been attained in Germany today are indecent we do hear people getting a you know hundred thousand marks for a pair of concerts things like that it's it's preposterous I mean nobody that good I have in one or two cases turned back a fee if I felt I haven't done a proper job really have been a little embarrassed once in a while by things that I've done I wonder if some day we shouldn't be more on a kind of incentive clause you know we get paid a good amount if we do a good job if we don't do a good job we don't get paid so much [Music] I'm not once people who believes the musical figures should be paid the same as sports personalities we don't have the same kind of Commercial Appeal we have a limited audience and I worry the future of what we do is in great jeopardy because monetarily we can't be afforded [Music] only the conductors who really make box office deserve to make as much money as they make and this was the case in giant case the same case in Benson's case and that it yeah all the other ones cost money traditionally a conductor would have one or two store one opera house with which he would spend most of his life it was like a marriage you might have other bits on the side he might even have a permanent mistress in another city but the the commitment was there and it lasted until death did them part or until or until divorce and he moved on somewhere else that was the commitment on which great music was made come the jet age and certain agents suddenly realized that they could split to their conductors into twos and threes they could make the music director on three continents at one at the same time so that the conductor would be only three very large salaries and spending no more than three months of the year at any of his post [Applause] [Music] management is a key factor today there's a great deal of mutual masturbation of an hour of anaesthetic and commercial nature in this field management's can piggyback at lesser talent on a major Talent and that can certainly make requirements that you will not cooperate with you unless you do such-and-such for us I think the days when the primary consideration was art are long gone well obviously there are certain conductors who are are more equal than other conductors because they sell records all these record companies are looking for the next whatever carry on whatever and obviously if they find somebody that they think is that they will market him as hard as possible and they want to market him both in terms of the records and in terms of appearances I cannot imagine a single record company that does not want to get another two or three people in there and if they smell out that there's a conductor that is going to be coming along they're going to run like crazy for one of the most interesting phenomena in the last 15 years is the rise of the Italian composer Giuseppe Sinopoli at the beginning of the 80s his name was known perhaps to a handful of contemporary music vows then suddenly he had a recording contract to the conductor and then in 1983 he was appointed principal a conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra after having them I think the only one but certainly not more than a handful of concerts and what worries me is that nothing that I've heard has suggested to me that this man is one of the major conductors in the world and should be leading an orchestra with such a great tradition and it seems to me extraordinary that this can happen in what was once regarded as the musical capital of the world I think media hype and attention makes it altogether possible for mediocre talents to stand on a podium and create something resembling a sound because so much can be glossed over in a recording studio or glossed over in making a film or corrected somehow electronically or all the mix in magic and voodoo of modern communications I think that the reason why most classical concerts are the standard repertory why these concerts are so boring or average is because most of the star conductors who give them are using these concerts as well hustles for the recording session the next day and this is a big problem that they have big record contracts and orchestras need these vocal contracts as well now that the public performance doesn't really matter very much it's the CD and the advertising for is in the magazines that actually matters more and so in one sense the conductor has this extreme power and earned a lot of money but in fact they're just the front men for the very powerful of major record labels and I think that the public suffers because a lot of people don't know whether something is a very very good performance or a spectacular sort of experience they just sort of think it must be good because this star conductor is doing it and this is a famous orchestra the problem has been exacerbated of course with the phenomenal growth of the CD industry which nobody expected then you had have had in the last three or four years this extraordinary phenomenon of Sony trying to get into the business and the way they felt they could get into the business was by spending a huge amount of money and losing a huge amount of money in order to establish a presence and a lot of on doctors have got a lot of money and they hope that's going to continue forever I cannot see this continuing forever because I cannot imagine that either the Polygram group or Sony or the Allied figures EMI Bertelsmann RCA whatever or makes any money at all on this and eventually somebody's going to have to say no and once that happens then you're going to have a shakeout as far as I'm concerned because you're nothing have none person standing there when everybody else backs off but I think it's going to have to be sown noria Olga is President of Syria today is a pastime conductor with a man who gets up in the small hours every night to study is conducting scores but throwing large modules of yen is not going to solve the conducting crisis and certainly could well find itself in a very few years without any new styles of the podium in the podium without anyone left to record when Sony came into the business they obviously were intent upon signing up big star names they heard eel Bengal carry on and unfortunately for them Cary Ann died in the arms of mr. ogre who great great fan of Cary and then they signed up Bernstein of course Bernstein did exactly the same thing he got when they signed up Horowitz and he died and I think they're now in considerable difficulty Carrie and Bernstein were the two great icons conducting icons in a way they were also the two great cash cars of the record business suddenly with the demise of those two almost within a year of each other the bottom is falling out of the full price record market because there are no similar star named around [Music] [Applause] what is happening now you have first of all schools in which they they learn to conduct so what's happening there they stand in front of mirrors and make their movements you know and that's the way they learn conducting I know of a lot of young conductors who conduct and have nice movements they can't even play their scores on the piano they can do nothing that's one thing the other thing is we have these competitions now everybody knows about these competitions all right I am against all these competitions to begin with it's like like all mph you know Olympics who plays faster more perfectly more perfect but alright with with instruments would instrumentalist of singers you can at least find out ok there's some tremendous genius or tremendous talent playing a violin or so but with conductors that's why we have so many conductors now we never had so many before and yet so very few in our time it is usual this there can be on connect us needs death they have heard four or five CDs DeLong and they make copies that's not the right with the conductor today their first Trista is recorded in a video is made of it and it's over with you know we'd never heard Bert bangles Tristana till he had came back to tristin about 700 club and after a while there was an interpretation you know I mean I think one of the problems for young conductors is this need for instant results you know and frankly that's not part of our business it's come to the point where there are very few concerts or opera performances that you can go to in expectation of hearing an outstanding performance perhaps an occasional Carlos Kleiber or Klaus hench debt or George salty but these are rarities they're representatives of a fading breed [Music] [Applause] Carlos Kleiber commands a great deal of respect you feel that the orchestra is trying terribly hard to play the piece the way he wants it and in fact over and above that they are trying to play their very best for each other for him for the performance itself and that's what makes for me his performance is so exciting I think this man has everything his wonderful musician it's fantastic technique is a you know is just great personality [Music] class tents jet is special that is one of the greatest conductors in the world I think because he molds the music in an organic way that seems totally natural it's a gift which he can transmit to the players and of course the players produce the sound the performance goes on and the public hear something special even if they don't know much about music I think they realize they're hearing something special [Music] for a performance to be great as opposed to adequate a conductor has to live every note of the music from beginning right the way through Taniya he has to have a total passionate he has to feel every bar that's why for a lot of conductors for people like tension it it's a very great experience to conduct especially if you're not a particularly good health you have to have that element you look at Toscanini and Phil is one of those boring conductors in the world to watch he appears to look like some sort of Italian band master beating time no demonstration nothing nothing glamorous to get from the audience's point of him and I bet you something was coming through him through his eyes through his whole being that let that Orchestra know that he was part of them and with them all the way to the piece we have been fortunate in the past to have had a whole generation or two generations of major conduct oral figures you cannot manufacture a conductor you cannot fake a conductor you cannot create a personality of modest talent into a supposed major interpreter it doesn't work these questions would never be asked two generations ago because everybody knew then that conducting was a slow maturing process conductors took responsibilities for their orchestras shaped those orchestral instruments the way they envisioned the music they wanted to do that is almost a thing of the past today we have much more orchestras than ever people in a worldwide phenomena we have hundreds of focusing the word Symphony Orchestra or thousands probably I don't dare to count it and some of them is marvelous so the profession became on the one hand more difficult because the people expecting more from you on the other hand is much more easier because you can contact all over the world oka STIs we are in a period where we have supreme technical excellence where we're performances are less polished and as well performed as we have a right to expect in many ways better than they were in the golden days but technical excellence doesn't mean interpretive excellence I do think the chances of a real individual performance emanating from the podium are less good now than they were 30 years ago I think an empty musical performance is a waste of time I'd rather hear a lot of mistakes and have music moved me than hear brilliantly articulated performance that says nothing and we hear a lot of those now quite a few my colleagues are really quite famous and they've done nothing for music except bring it to the state we find it in many in many corners of the world that is something which is totally dissected and removed from the needs of people to hear in music reflected their own feelings and their own emotions and to have the feeling that they've participated in the experience which is going to change their lives so we need a generation of conductors that are able to communicate meaning not just the formal terms of music making who themselves are courageous figures who stand for something and have a civic profile the same way Toscanini could defy Mussolini and it was a public gesture of an artist that had enormous political social and moral consequence because Toscanini knew that a Beethoven symphony wasn't about do we follow the metronome marks or not was about defying tyranny for example and that as an artist one was a complete being a social and a moral being as well as an artist that's the task now for conductors we need conductors who can stand up and say something in this world that is falling apart in front of our very eyes and use this fantastically precious classical repertoire that we have as a way of conveying the highest aspirations of a society [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Burtw47

Views: 80,237

Keywords: Conductors, conducting, documentary

Id: VPSqRqcB6I4

Length: 50min 4sec (3004 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2017