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!