Baton down the hatches

What most conductors don’t seem to know about music:

What the composer wrote should be taken seriously. Obviously there are mistakes, inconsistencies, miscalculations and sketchy dynamics and articulations in a lot of pieces. But there’s lots of notation in many standard works that are substantive and are consistently ignored.

I’ll give two examples from Mozart. In the last 10 bars or so of the “Marriage of Figaro” overture, the first violins have dotted half notes. Why is it always played like half notes with quarter rests? And in the second and third bars before the end, the firsts have half notes while the rest of the orchestra have quarter notes? Why do conductors always decide that Mozart didn’t know what he was doing here?

Crescendi always happen too early. I’ll give two more examples, this time from Beethoven. At the end of that very thorny fugue in the last movement of the Ninth, the An die Freude mofit appears with full chorus and orchestra. Two bars before that, there are two bars of orchestra marked “crescendo.” Those two bars are invariably started mf. How about the pp that’s marked with the crescendo happening mostly in the second bar rather than the first? It would have lots more impact. And there’s a similar spot right before the finale of the 5th. Why does every conductor allow every orchestra, as soon as they see “crescendo,” to immediately kick the dynamic up two notches? Imagine that passage with most of the crescendo happening in the bars right before the finale (rather than the ff arriving at least four bars early) and you’ll see what I mean.

Orchestra musicians are able to fix a range of problems without help from the conductors. Balance isn’t one of them. But few conductors seem to understand that what the audience hears might be difference from what they can hear from where they stand. I recently heard a great American orchestra play the Bruckner Ninth with a great German conductor. Whenever the trombones came in, the strings might as well have gone out for coffee. Would it have hurt the conductor to go out into the hall and see if the paying customers could hear an orchestra rather than just three first-rate trombonists? Admittedly balancing Bruckner is hard. But so is playing it, and the musicians were doing just fine. How can they know what the balances are in the hall if no one tells them?

An aircraft designer once said that the most useful thing he could add to an airplane was more lightness. The most useful thing that can be added to most interpretations is more semplice. There’s an awful lot of performing going on that is, as a wise old colleague of mine once said, “a career on every note.” Most music doesn’t need that much interpretive help to sound good.

As far as getting along with conductors goes, it helps a lot to remember that the conductor is human and is probably doing as best they can. Of course it’s easier to remember that when the conductor is a decent human being, a good musician, and a competent technician. But far too many musicians regard even those paragons as the enemy. There is much about the orchestral workplace – conductors probably more than anything else – that can provoke chronic anger within musicians. But that anger is often (not always) a choice made by those musicians, and not a healthy one either. How about choosing open-mindedness and a basic level of charity instead? It’s a lot more pleasant way to live.