Be Prepared

First of all, we’re back! Thanks to our tireless marketing staff, the whole ItC blog has been migrated over to WordPress, and we even managed to bring all the reader comments along from the old Blogger site as well. Hopefully, you’ll find this layout a bit more readable, and we’ll find it a lot less annoying to interface with.

One thing we haven’t finished doing yet, however, is to bring along all the embedded video and audio in our archived entries. Basically, we need to re-embed every one of them in order to get them to show up here, so apologies if it takes a while to get to that. Also, if you encounter any other problems with the new site, drop me a line at sbergman[at]mnorch.org, and I’ll pass it along to the experts.

Now, down to business. There were actually a number of big stories in the classical music world this past week, but the story that really caught my eye was this blistering review in yesterday’s New York Times. Not only did Anthony Tommasini declare Leonard Slatkin’s version of a Met Opera classic to be a mess, he also called out the conductor for literally not knowing the score. It seems that Slatkin (a former MN Orch Sommerfest director and current music director of the Detroit Symphony) arrived in New York without having put in a lot of time studying the score to Verdi’s La Traviata, and admitted as much on his personal blog. Rumors had been swirling within the orchestra world that things were not going well in rehearsal as a result, and it sounds from Tommasini’s review as if the comfort level hadn’t improved much by the first performance.

Now, I have no desire to pile on Leonard, who has always been a nice guy and a good friend to our orchestra. But I think this unfortunate story points up two important truths about the duties of a conductor. The first is that conducting opera is a very, very different skill than conducting purely orchestral rep, and there are few conductors who are equally comfortable in both arenas. Also, the Met Opera being one of the world’s premiere opera companies makes it a fairly unsuitable place to be conducting anything for the very first time in one’s career. (In fairness, it also bears mentioning that Traviata was not, in fact, the opera Leonard was originally engaged to conduct.)

The second truth is that not all conductors are in the habit of putting in the kind of intensive preparation time that is necessary to really know a score. In fact, there are some very famous conductors who are notorious for “winging it,” flying by the seat of their pants in rehearsal and counting on the orchestra’s familiarity with the music to get them through it. And since, technically, all we absolutely have to see from the podium to play a symphony is a vaguely discernible beat pattern, the performances can often come off without a technical hitch. (It’s always fun to read reviews of this sort of performance, and see a conductor given credit for all manner of interpretational choices that were actually pure happenstance.)

Conductors like this tend to think of themselves, in my experience, as amiable coaches for the orchestra, rather than stern leaders. They justify their lack of preparation by imagining that they’re tackling the big picture, rather than all the little niggling details that most listeners won’t hear anyway. In rehearsal, they’re given to grand, sweeping statements about the meaning of the music, rather than specific directions on how we should play the next phrase. Which, to me, misses the point of being a conductor. We’re all musicians, and any one of us could make reasonable decisions on the tempo of a slow movement, or how loud a particular fortissimo should be. But there are 95 of us, and we wouldn’t all make the same decision, so it’s the conductor’s job to make those calls and enforce them. And if you don’t come in knowing the score well enough to have an opinion, you’ve just rendered yourself virtually useless to us as a leader.

As I said, underprepared conductors can still lead decent concerts, and certainly, pleasing the musicians of the orchestra is not any conductor’s primary job. But if you ask me, being prepared is about respect: for your musicians, for the composer, and for the audience that’s paying good money to watch you work. And just as the most important work I do as a violist is the preparation I put in at home before the first rehearsal of the week, the most important work a conductor does needs to happen before s/he ever takes the podium. And if you’re not interested in doing that work, you’re really in the wrong line of work.