Who Knows Best?
December 16, 2003
By Michelle Dulak
The New York Philharmonic sent a delegation of players to a meeting of the orchestra's Board of Directors last week, asking the Board to extend Lorin Maazel's contract for two years. And New York Times critic John Rockwell asked the question last Friday: Who can better judge a conductor: the players working under him, or the audience hearing him?
Granted, he may have prejudiced the question just a little bit in the way he phrased it. "Whereas critics tend to prize creative excitement, profundity of interpretation and charisma," Rockwell writes, "orchestra musicians — while hardly forswearing such virtues, at least in principle — often seem to base their decisions about a conductor on his rehearsal efficiency and lack of pretension."
Whoa there. Why are these opposed categories? Can't a conductor be "creatively exciting" and also rehearse efficiently? Can't he be profound and unpretentious at the same time? Is there something about charisma that mysteriously repels respect?
Rockwell notes later on that "[m]odern-day orchestras, to judge from those with whom I have had backstage dealings, are full of admirable musicians who are often thoughtful and intelligent people." The condescension here is breathtaking (classical musicians, "often" thoughtful, even intelligent? Who knew?), but the cluelessness vies with it.
Getting to the level of musical proficiency required to win an audition for the New York Philharmonic requires a sustained, intense (not to say demented) commitment, with little certainty of monetary reward. You do not do that unless you love music enough to pay a price for it. You do not do that if you don't crave intense musical experiences — the kind that Rockwell calls "creatively exciting" and "profound." That is what you spent all those hours in the practice room to get at. Players at that level have been choosing musical satisfaction over comfort for a long, long time.
Rockwell analogizes the orchestra to a set of chess pieces — "king (the conductor), ministers and courtiers (concertmaster and principals), and the rabble, or pawns, down below, sawing away at a back desk." Which is about as succinct a recipe for a sullen orchestra as I can imagine. Musicians, being human, would rather not be regarded as pawns. And musicians taught to regard themselves as pawns make bad music. Rockwell ambivalently praises famous whip-cracking maestri (Toscanini, Reiner), and though I'm too young to have seen them conduct, I can admire the discipline and vision in their recordings. But I've seen other orchestras play, and I know well enough from the sound — and the sight — which players are thinking of themselves as pawns and which aren't.
Take the Berlin Philharmonic a couple of weeks back, or for that matter the Bavarian Radio Symphony (conducted by Maazel, Rockwell's ostensible non-subject — the piece begins "This is not a column about Lorin Maazel") earlier in the year. These orchestras are pawn-free zones. (Listening to them, it was hard not to think of Charles Burney's description of the Mannheim court orchestra in the mid-18th century as "an army of generals." Or kings?) No one was ever "sawing away at a back desk." You could see the commitment and the intensity and the love in the players' very postures and motions, and at the back of the sections quite as much as at the front. Nothing mundane, nothing routine; furious force, infinite tenderness. Can it possibly be because every one of them is treated as an artist?
Rockwell writes of efforts "to extend the conductorless Baroque string ensemble into the Romantic orchestral realm." His example is the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, which has indeed done some 19th-century symphonies (though it took all of two minutes online to discover that the symphonies in their current season end in the eighteenth century with Haydn's "Oxford" (1789) and begin again in the twentieth with Ives (No. 3) and Carter (No. 1); the nineteenth century is represented by three concertos and Dvorák's Czech Suite). I don't think his description of the Orpheus rehearsal process, where the players "supposedly" (Rockwell's word) generate the interpretation collectively, with the concertmaster cueing in performance, is quite right; my understanding is that one player, not always the concertmaster, is elected to preside over rehearsals of each piece, and that cues might be given by whatever instrument is handiest at the moment, just as they would be in a smaller chamber ensemble.
Rockwell associates "conductorlessness" with facelessness, as though character can flow only through a baton. He can't have observed that many baton-free Baroque orchestras if he thinks they're all run on democratic lines. Someone is always directing, from the violin or from the keyboard, and that person's vision is projected, sometimes very decisively indeed. Anyone who thinks otherwise ought to see, say, Elizabeth Wallfisch rehearsing the Baroque band at the Carmel Bach Festival. No conductor; but serious, and detailed (some might possibly say over-detailed) direction. Likewise, I've seen Jeffrey Thomas of the American Bach Soloists direct a St. John Passion doing nothing during the choruses but unobtrusively beating the tactus from the side of the stage with his hand; but that was all he needed to do to facilitate a performance prepared in great and loving detail in rehearsal. Philharmonia Baroque with Nic McGegan at the harpsichord is as much Nic's instrument as Philharmonia Baroque with Nic on the podium.
The point isn't that there's some magic in not being led by a baton-waving fellow in front. The point is that all of these orchestras are small enough that their members know that they aren't pawns, and also know that their director (wielding baton, bow, or empty hands) doesn't think of them as pawns. I've played with two of these three bands, and it was a fact that you were taken seriously, by your peers and by your director. The trick is creating that feeling of being important, even at the "back desks," in a big orchestra.
The great European orchestras have done it. Some do it by being self-governing (as Rockwell correctly points out). Rattle's success with the Berlin Phil doubtless has something to do with the fact that they chose him. A partnership chosen by both sides is probably carefully considered. But Maazel's Bavarian Radio Symphony wasn't his by the players' gift; yet they played like gangbusters for him.
Can Maazel do the same with the notoriously cynical NY Phil? Has he already? Rockwell himself says (in the obligatory damning-with-faint-praise paragraph) that "[ . . . ] the orchestra has rarely if ever played better; it gleams." Maybe because it's respected? I remember that Bavarian Radio Brahms symphony cycle from last spring; the concentration and the intensity would have been appalling if you didn't sense the joy behind them. But it was impossible not to understand if you saw the players at their work.
There is, of course, a sense in which musicians are self-serving. They aren't typically looking for comfort or ease, exactly; but they are looking for something, and it may not be exactly what the audience — or rather the critics — want. To read Rockwell, you'd think he was not merely a critic but the director of a critics' PAC. In his article the desires of the critics are everywhere; we learn what critics "prize," what they found "too often staid and plain," &c. The most telling passage is that in which he reveals that "a single vision" is what "critics and the public crave." Notice which he puts first.
Let good musicians do what they want to do, and they'll naturally do it well; but it won't always be what the critics want done. I suspect that Rockwell's deliberately-not-about-Maazel piece was pretty much about Maazel after all, given that Rockwell is enamored of musical trends that the elderly Maazel isn't likely to take up. Rockwell's piece ends, characteristically, in a call for conductors to "[absorb] influences from contemporary composers, classical and otherwise, and from world music and the early-music movement." Well, you can't get much more ecumenical than that. (Except, of course, that Rockwell isn't likely to call on world-music players and early-music players and non-classical contemporary composers to "absorb" any influences from the "classical" canon).
For myself, I'd like to see orchestras choosing their own conductors in the same way that string quartets choose their own first violinists, the only criterion being "Are you the person who will best help us to make great music?" And I'd trust any of the great orchestras to make that decision itself.
(Michelle Dulak, editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and the New York Times.)
©2003 Michelle Dulak, all rights reserved