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.