Conducting something we don't want to do!

We've all had to do it at some stage of our careers! Conduct something we have no affinity for, no allegiance towards and for which we have no sympathy and nothing in common! But I can honestly say, there is no job from which I haven't learnt something. Even if it was something as mundane as during the run of an American ballet company and I had been booked to play the piano part of a piano quintet version of The Blue Danube. I went out drinking with a viola player (the legendary Brian Mack) and thought I could hold my own with him. Never try and out drink a viola player. He made sure I went under the table....and stayed there. That taught me a valuable lesson. But mostly, it is matters of musical education in which I learn something. It may be technique, it may be the ability not to hear what you want to hear, but hear what the audience are hearing. That is quite complicated to learn: the ability to divorce yourself from the emotion of whatever piece you are conducting and conduct from a technical point of view, yet at the same time impart to the orchestra the emotion you are feeling. It is called self-control: going up to a certain point but not straying over it. If you stray over it, the music you imagine you are hearing is not actually what is being performed. You think it is better than actually it is. Some of my best performances I have known about at the time and known they were going well. You can feel the audience are with you as well. However, the reverse is also true. Some years ago I gave a performance of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture with one of the world's great orchestras and I was completely wrapped up in it. The strings, for which they are famous, sounded lush, rich and full of searing heartache. The brass were like fighting families and the woodwind had all the solemnity of Friar Tuck. I thought it was ruddy marvellous! Yet, I had not yet learnt self-control and the performance happened to be recorded. It was not nearly as good as I had thought! Tempi were wrong, dynamics not always well controlled and worst of all, the emotion was all on the surface. I learnt an important lesson that day: do not get so involved in the music as to lose all rationale.

Learning scores

How do conductors learn the music they are about to conduct? Actually an anology of how I do it is very easy. For me, it is like reading a book, only you then have to memorise the contents, or at least know all the reltaionships intimately. Let's say you are reading one of the great classics: a Charles Dickens. And let's take Oliver Twist. When you read the book, you are taken on a journey by Mr. Dickens, from the birth of Oliver to his eventual happiness where we leave him with a bright future and wonderful prospects. But the journey of how he reached this state is what interests the reader. The relationships he has on the way. The disasters he encounters. It is very much the same with a conductor. I sit in my favourite chair and read the score as I would a book. I let my imagination enter the world of the composer and imagine how an orchestra would sound playing these notes. I think of the relationship between the oboe and the clarinet and the various themes they are playing. Why does it sound it one way when the oboe plays it and another when the clarinet does? Why does the composer play it piano the first time through but forte the second? There will be a reason and one must know them before attempting to conduct it. I never listen to a recording, because all one then does is conduct the music the same as someone else. This is how mistakes are perpetuated. A rit here, a tempo change there, all become with constant repetition accepted as "tradition". People are surprised when I show them my ipod. There is very little music on it. I have it for my own recordings (so I can learn where I went wrong) and a few that I consider can never be surpassed, so should not be attempted. Mainly these are the recordings of Rudolph Kempe, a conductor I consider certainly the greatest I ever saw, and to my mind probably the greatest that ever lived, though I do think Karl Bohm was up there with him. My recodings are there not because I listen to them, I only rarely do, but on the occasion of repeat performances, I can play them and think what can I do to make it better. So the life of a conductor is a solitary one. Either you are sitting in your favourite chair wrapped up in your sound world, or you are sitting in your hotel room in some far away country, waiting for a rehearsal to begin so you can put into practise all the work you have done in your favourite chair. Ah, but when that rehearsal does begin, all that solitude has been worth it!

update to Ballet magazine article

The following is taken from another article I wrote for the March issue of Dance Review, replying to various letters the magazine had received.

Interesting reaction to my comments on tempi in ballet. Having lingered over the adjective “dishy” used in the description of me by Patricia Williams in her January issue letter, I suppose my main point generally was that one art form should not be at the expense of another and I believe that that is what can happen in ballet. I parted company with Richard Honner’s otherwise excellent arguments in his letter of February, when he said that I forget at my peril that ballet, for its audience, is first and foremost a visual art form. I don’t think it need be or indeed should be, as one could not do without the other, and I firmly believe that ballet audiences would get far greater satisfaction out of a performance if the music was as wonderful as the dancing and treated by all choreographers and dancers as equal. Is opera a visual art form or an aural one? Are West End musicals visual or aural? Is Shakespeare? The answer is of course, they are all both. Neither one dominates the other in any of those art forms, why can’t ballet be the same? Or is that the problem? Is it conceived by audiences, dancers, management and choreographers as mainly a visual art form? I personally think that’s a mistake and there should be just as much artistic magic and technical accomplishment going on in the pit as on the stage. As Patricia wrote, and I’m sorry to refer to Patricia’s letter again but she is obviously a person of extremely discerning taste, if the technical brilliance of modern day dancers makes the re-creation of original 19th century choreography difficult to execute, then may I suggest it is performed as originally intended with the limitations that implies upon the dancers, or create modern choreography to go with the original music. Do one or the other but not a mixture of both! I have no aversion to variations of tempi that are different to how I personally imagine them to be, but my aim as a conductor is to re-create the music I am conducting how I imagine the composer originally intended it to be heard. But it is only my execution of the composer’s intentions that makes my performance different from another’s. Tempo markings with slight variations however are fairly universal and accepted and should not be interfered with. It is therefore the extremes of tempi and interpretation I cannot tolerate, which is where I disagree with Colin Ede. I was never able to accept Bernstein’s liberal reading of a composer’s explicit markings. My understanding is that he never liked it when it was perpetrated in reverse! Colin Ede may like Bernstein’s Nimrod but I’m fairly certain Edward Elgar would not! Whether that matters is I guess partly what this discussion is all about. Is it Bernstein’s Nimrod or Elgar’s? For me, when a passage is marked Allegro and it is performed Andante, or as in the case of the White Swan solo I quoted, Andante taken Molto Adagio due to the whim of a ballerina’s attitude (in every sense of the word), it makes no sense. Collaboration between performers is the key here, not dominance of one over the other. And far from Mr. Tchaikovsky being pleased his lovely music was being played by ballet companies throughout the world as Robert Harrold in the January issue imagines, I think the composer would be tearing his hair out with frustration, because sometimes to me, and very probably would have been to him, I think his wonderful music is almost unrecognisable!

hypnosis

I touched in my last blog on the subject of hypnosis over musicians as practised by conductors. It is quite extraordinary how if you are absolutley sure of what you want in terms of tempo and any nuances or sudden inspired "moments", these can be transmitted by the power of hypnosis to musicians. However, you have to be absolutely secure in your thoughts to achieve the result you want. I don't know how it is done. I suppose it is something to do with your eyes, your arm and body movements and you know absolutely what you want, so the gesture you transmit is obvious to the musicians for it to happen. This even extends to chords when played by the whole orchestra. If you know absolutely where you want the note placed in relation to your downbeat, then that is where the orchestra will play. Confidence is everything. This is why conductors have to be so arrogant: they know where the chord should be played, they know the tempo of the piece, they know they are going to do a very slight ritardando (perhaps not rehearsed). The trouble comes when although they know where they want it, they are not transmitting it with their bodies. So only the "natural" conductors can succeed in practising the art of hypnosis. Those who have to study how to conduct, will not be able to instinctively show what they want to the orchestra. The conductor is almost in a trance, so there is no point in thinking more of your technique than the music: too miuch focus on the wrong aspect of performance. When this forcing of your will by some power that is within you happens, then that is the performance we as musicians all strive to achieve. It takes the concert onto a higher level of artistic merit.

To memorise or not to memorise

Last weekend with the Ulster Orchestra, I conducted Dvorak's New World Symphony from memory. Whilst this is not an extraordinary feat in itself, it did free me from the constraints of having to follow the music on a bit of paper and turn the pages at the correct time. This sounds obvious but believe me, if the conductor has learnt his trade properly and studied the score correctly he should know the music intimately and therefore huge parts of the music are not necessary for him to follow. However, this has its downside as what happens if he has a score open in front of him and has been conducting for some considerable time without needing to refer to the score, but suddenly comes to a bit of which he is unsure? Too late, the music is not open on the right page and suddenly panic will set in and pages will start flying as he hurriedly looks for the right place in the performance! Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the orchestra will save him, but they can see and sense the uncertainty in his eyes and demeanour, and nothing destroys the confidence of an orchestra in a conductor more than uncertainty. Therefore when I conduct from memory I make sure I know every note, well not quite every note, but I must make sure I can sing the piece all the way through in my mind before closing the score. I have a video recording of Toscanini conducting a live performance of Beethoven 5 and at the end of the symphony with the final chords, you know he expects a chord in one of the silent bars as he gives a definite donwbeat. There is shock registered on his face, then a flicker of disgust with himself, before the orchestra to a man (in those days) saves him and plays not a note. So it can happen to even the greatest of memory men, and Toscanini was one such as he used to rehearse and perform everything from memory. The audience will not have noticed, but the orchestra will, as they sense what all great conductors possess and that is the art of hypnosis as perpertrated by conductors was broken for a few seconds. That is perhaps a subject for another day, meanwhile I will only conduct those pieces I know as intimately as I know the back of my wife's hand. It gives me freedom and the ability to engage with each and every great musician within the orchestra without having to take my eyes off them, look down, and check I'm on the right page. After all, conducting music is a bit like having a conversation with someone, and when you talk to people, do you look them in the eyes or keep looking down at the floor?

Problems in ballet.

The following is reproduced from an article I wrote for the December issue of Dance Review Magazine. Please see subsequent issues for follow-up correspondence.

Now I admit, I haven’t conducted ballet for some considerable time. In fact, the last time I did so Birmingham Royal Ballet was still called Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet! And perhaps subsequent reading will explain why! However, I do still occasionally see our ballet companies as I accompany my 15 year old daughter to a performance of one of the great Tchaikovsky ballets, and I regularly discuss the wonderful world of ballet with musicians who play in the various orchestras of our national ballet companies. The standard of our dance companies has possibly never been higher, with dancers ever more able to hold positions and attitudes, all the time looking wonderfully graceful. However, this is often to the detriment of the music and brings me to the role of the conductor and the musicians who create the aural part of dancing without whom there would be no dance. It seems to me they are there to serve the art of the ballet dancer’s body in the never-ending quest for beauty of line, as the dancers get more competent in their ability to perform more complicated steps. Fairly recently I watched a performance of Swan Lake with one of our national companies and I sat there writhing in agony! Tchaikovsky never wrote the music to be performed as was being performed that evening, in most cases going so slowly as to almost bring proceedings to a halt. White Swan in particular was musically terrible as the conductor waited for the dancer to hop painfully slowly across the stage. I could hardly sit there and if it wasn’t for my daughter, I would have walked out. The tempo marking for the White Swan solo is marked as Andante Non Troppo, the Non Troppo (not too much) being the important part here. So, the literal translation is “at a walking pace, but not too much”. What we got was a crawl…on all fours! Yes, you can argue about the pulse, is it 6 or 2, but as long as the music flows and is not held up by the whim of a technically proficient dancer wishing to show everyone her technical brilliance of balancing on one leg, then I am happy. But it didn’t. After all, if as an audience member you are being told by an artist to look how wonderful she is, how technically clever she is, then in my opinion, as that audience member you do not notice the art. The greatest artists in whatever art form you care to mention, were technically wonderful (though of course there are the exceptions), but when you watched or listened to them, you forgot their technical ability and were transported to a world that the artist had created and forced you by their artistry to enter. You look at a painting by Monet and don’t think how technically wonderful it is, though it is; you watched Rudolph Kempe conduct and didn’t think wasn’t his stick technique superb, though it was the best; you listened to Artur Rubinstein and were not dazzled by his technique, but instead awed by the total mastery of his art form. And I have deliberately chosen great artists who are sadly no longer with us, as I do not wish to upset living artists by not mentioning them, some of whom may be my friends! You do not notice the artist through their technique, but through their art, and as such their technique is a by-product of that art.
I honestly think some ballet choreographers forget that ballet is an aural art as well as a visual art. There should be a meeting of the two and the one should not be exclusive of the other. It’s no good the choreographer trying to put too many steps into too small a time span, and when it subsequently proves impossible to perform, telling the conductor to slow down. I have been asked many times by various choreographers who had created too many steps to slow the music down, though the correct tempo was that much quicker. In most cases I refused, believing it wasn’t the composer’s fault his music should suffer by being played at an incorrect tempo. Interestingly enough, the one choreographer who told me to conduct the music as I felt it (and I attended all his rehearsals) was Sir Kenneth MacMillan. He trusted me and I thought he was a genius of ballet! Now I realise, that in this time-orientated world we live in, conductors always attending rehearsals, and indeed having the same conductor and soloists for consecutive performances can be impossible. But all combinations should be worked out in rehearsal and the ultimate arbiter of tempi should be the conductor, after all he is the only person (along with the orchestra) who is there for the entire evening. Others come on, do their solo, and go off. So as the only one there throughout, the conductor should be the person in control of the overall shape of that evening’s ballet: he must therefore be allowed to shape it. I always said to dancers, if you do not like my tempi, come and talk to me, but after the performance when we will discuss it. During the performance I was in charge! Our ballet companies should become more like our opera companies where the conductor makes the decision on musical matters and any differences of opinions are sorted in rehearsals. Too often in ballet, the conductor is thought of as a secondary necessity. He must not be. He is just as important as the principal dancers, though I appreciate to an audience that may not be the case! However, to the management he should be. All of the above does not preclude the conductor from helping his soloists. It is a meeting of two art forms and the one is as important as the other. From what I’ve recently seen (and heard from despairing musicians), it is heavily biased in favour of the dance, and if they want me to take my daughter back to Tchaikovsky, it’s time some Artistic Directors and choreographers balanced out their priorities. After all, Tchaikovsky was one of the great composers and wrote great music; he never wrote boring music…….unless it is being performed by a ballet company!

© Anthony Inglis