Symphonies & Scorpions: The Work Begins
WELCOME! THIS IS THE THIRD DAILY INSTALLMENT OF SYMPHONIES & SCORPIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL CONCERT TOUR AS AN INSTRUMENT OF CITIZEN DIPLOMACY. I INVITE YOU TO READ THE ENTIRE BOOK , ONE DAY AT A TIME, FOR FREE, OR YOU CAN PURCHASE THE BOOK IN ITS ENTIRETY, IN PAPERBACK OR KINDLE, HERE. ENJOY!
T HE W ORK B EGINS
[image error]Salt Lake City
Saturday, April 12, 2014
An Ominous Portent
Should I answer the phone? The previous time I had hauled myself off the couch and away from the living room television, Real Salt Lake—Utah’s Major League Soccer franchise—gave up a 1-0 lead to the Philadelphia Union. RSL regained the lead in the eighty-fifth minute and I don’t want to risk jinxing them again. But with April 15 looming and my tax return not yet finished, the call could be from my CPA. I don’t want to jinx that either.
It’s not my accountant. It’s Ronan Lefkowitz, a Boston Symphony violinist and my closest orchestra buddy. He joined the BSO in 1976, a year after me. We’d both studied with the BSO’s then-concertmaster, Joseph Silverstein; Ronan at Harvard and I at Yale. I’m Uncle Jerry to his kids, and he’s Uncle Ronan to mine. Because I’ll be leaving Salt Lake City for Boston in a couple days, I assume Ronan’s call is to discuss when we’ll get together for dinner.
Wrong. The call is to tell me that the BSO has just been notified by Lorin Maazel that for health reasons he is withdrawing from the Boston concerts and the tour.
I had seen a Facebook post stating that Maazel had recently canceled a couple of engagements, the aftermath of an accident he had late in 2013, but I assumed he was just conserving his energy for the tour. After all, he was in his eighties, but for conductors sometimes that’s when they’re just getting frisky. Besides, Maazel took pride that each of his parents lived about a century and he still felt like a spring chicken.
A Concise Primer of Conductor Anatomy
Like the NBA drafting kids straight out of high school, these days there’s a youth movement for music directors. But the allure of the young conductor is nothing new. Look at Leonard Bernstein, who was twenty-five when he became assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and forty years old (a toddler when measured in conductor years) when he became its music director; and Seiji Ozawa, who was thirty-eight when he took the helm of the BSO. Nevertheless, it seems most orchestras, big and small, are beating the bushes for the next Gustavo Dudamel, who, with his talent, charisma, and enviable hair, has transformed the music culture of Los Angeles. And brought in a lot of money.
In 2014, the BSO, with its deep pockets guaranteeing them a perennially high draft pick, selected Andris Nelsons, a fresh-faced and good-natured thirty-five-year-old out of Latvia, to succeed the great but often infirm James Levine, who was on the disabled list more often than Derrick Rose. The BSO had recently been snake-bitten by conductors’ illnesses and accidents. In the summer of 2013 at its summer festival at Tanglewood, for example, three conductors cancelled at the last minute within a period of two weeks. One of those was the overly-outgoing Nelsons himself, who greeted a door in Germany a bit too enthusiastically and suffered a concussion.
I’ve always maintained that there’s more in common between great conductors and lousy ones than between great conductors and merely good ones. That is because both the great and the lousy have 1) a significant impact upon the performance, and 2) extraordinarily high egos. Good conductors manage affairs rather than control them; they tend to have a high degree of respect for, and confidence in the musicians. In the vernacular of the profession, they “let the orchestra play” and often get excellent, if not memorable, results. I call the combination of talent and ego my TAC index. TAC stands for Talent/Asshole Continuum. (See my mystery novel, Death and Transfiguration, to see the TAC taken to its extreme.) What it means is that the more talented a conductor is, the greater the asshole he can get away with being. Conversely… Well, watch out for conversely.
Conductors come in all shapes, sizes, and attitudes. Great and lousy alike have been known to badger, whine, and humiliate. But they can also cajole and compliment. As Sir Colin Davis once smilingly reminded the increasingly listless BSO musicians at the tail end of an intense, exhausting rehearsal, “Just remember, I’m only here to entertain you.”
Of course, there’s much more to it than that. Great conductors not only know how to beat proper time in their sleep (if you thought that’s something that should be taken for granted, don’t), they also have a concept of a piece of music—from Handel to Harbison—into which every detail snugly and logically conjoins, creating a unified and compelling whole. That makes them easy to follow even if their baton technique—like the late, great Klaus Tennstedt’s, for example—is more akin to a toddler grasping for butterflies. The essential thing is for the conductor to have a comprehensive concept, followed by the conviction and ability to make it clear to the musicians what (s)he wants, and then to insist on it. Lousy conductors pretend to know all this; and when things go awry, as they tend to with such conductors, they then point the finger of blame at the musicians.
Musicians, on the other hand, sometimes fault conductors for having inflated egos. After working with conductors great and small since I was a tot, I’ve conclude that lofty self-esteem not only comes with their territory, but also is a necessary component of being a great conductor. How else could a single individual wielding a tiny stick impose his/her will upon a hundred passionately opinionated musicians who are the ones actually making the sounds? It requires an unbreakable sense of self and of purpose; without it, each musician would go on his/her merry own way and performances would be at best directionless. Like the captain of a ship whose authority is unquestioned, should his leadership falter, the fate of the crew would be imperiled, Captain Bligh notwithstanding.
That’s not to say that a conductor must be an asshole to be great, though some of them undoubtedly are both. (You can put the emphasis on either the word must or asshole, and both would be accurate.) I’m not going to name names in case you’re wondering. And I’ll also say that once in a blue moon there is a truly humble great conductor—Andris Nelsons has turned out to be such a one. I just mean that strength of will, in whatever manifestation, is a prerequisite for success.
Orchestral musicians, trussed up in their monkey suits, look pretty much alike from the audience’s perspective, but they’re all actually quite different. Musicians come from different countries, have different training, different sets of aesthetics and abilities, different interests, different political views, different personalities. One of my Utah Symphony colleagues was a former Marine sharpshooter and liked to hunt big animals. Another was an expert knitter. If the guy on the podium doesn’t have a strong sense of the music and of self, of leading in a way that will gain the musicians’ respect, the performance may well be in for a rocky ride, regardless of each individual musician’s effort. That’s why I’ve postulated it would be better for a great orchestra to play without any conductor whatsoever than with a bad conductor. At least the musicians could fall back to listening to each other, and play the music “the way it goes,” rather than trying to interpret bad information from a central source.
If, on the Asia tour, Lorin Maazel had been replaced by a lesser conductor, the tour would not have been a musical disaster by any means. It still could have been quite good. The repertoire was fairly standard (in fact, a couple of the pieces, the Glinka Overture to Russlan and Ludmilla, and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain, were performed to death by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops way back when), and the BSO musicians have the ability to cruise on automatic pilot at a very respectable level with just about anyone waving a stick. But when concert ticket prices command upwards of $375, the performances need to be more than “quite good.” They need to be memorable, and that’s why the presenters rightly insisted—and the BSO concurred—that Maazel’s replacement had to be someone of equal stature.
Like the New York Yankees, the BSO has traditionally relied on a pitching rotation of heavyweight veterans with proven winning records as their guest conductors. That was especially true during the transition between the BSO’s last two music directors. Kurt Masur, Cristoph von Dohnanyi, Bernard Haitink, Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, Sir Colin Davis, and Maazel graced the podium regularly in recent years. The upside of this is that they were all among the world’s greatest maestros and sustained the highest artistic level for the orchestra. The downside is that they as they aged, health issues mounted. Contrary to conductors’ protestations otherwise, they are not immortal. Since 2014, all but Dohnanyi and Haitink have died, and those two have curtailed their activities due to age and infirmity. One wonders who will be the leaders of the next generation of maestros.
Time is of the Essence
“So, is the tour cancelled?” I ask Ronan. How would I break the news my friends in Japan who were already making plans to see me? He replies that it’s still up in the air. The orchestra’s artistic administrator, Anthony Fogg, is a magician at unearthing conductors at the last minute. He has certainly had enough practice. One would be correct to assume that the BSO’s exalted reputation would make it tempting for any conductor to jump at the opportunity to conduct it if they are available. But that’s a big if, since most conductors worth their salt are fully booked two to three years in advance, and hiring a conductor not worth his salt is simply not an option.
And this isn’t your typical single-program fill-in. This is a four-week commitment. The two weeks in Boston are slated for performances of the tour repertoire. Would programs have to be altered, rehearsals added, concerts rescheduled? The $64,000 question is whether the entire tour will have to be scrapped. Playing for a sympathetic home crowd is one thing, but would concert presenters in China and Japan be satisfied with a replacement conductor of lesser stature than Lorin Maazel? Even for an ensemble of the caliber of the BSO, an orchestra’s brand or reputation alone may not be sufficient to sell a tour, especially where audiences are accustomed to first-class international music making. The headliners—the conductor and/or guest artists—and the programs all combine to form a package that the presenters hope will justify stratospheric ticket prices.
Ronan says that the BSO management plans to inform the musicians of Maazel’s withdrawal at the concert that night, even though everyone in the orchestra had already heard the news through the grapevine. Management has refrained from making any public announcements until they have a backup plan, which seems sensible. I still plan to head to Boston on Monday. And why not, since Lynn Larsen hasn’t instructed me otherwise? And there’s always Tony Fogg to work his magic. There are lots of questions that need to be answered, and answered quickly. With Maazel’s withdrawal, phones will be ringing all around the world.
I hang up mine and return to the living room. I knew it! In the ninetieth minute—the ninetieth minute!—RSL had a defensive lapse in front of its goal, the Union had scored, and the match ended up in a 2-2 draw. Jinxed again. My wife, Cecily, suggests maybe I shouldn’t pack my bags just yet.
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