“I have been doing this job for 50 years. And you know, it is a profession and it is not a profession. It’s very obscure sometimes. What makes a good conductor? What is this thing about charisma? I’m still wondering after all these years.” Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink, 82, who would feature on any list of our greatest living orchestral conductors, is about to go on stage in the concert hall in Lucerne to lead his masterclass in conducting. If he doesn’t know the answer to the essential question, what do you need to make it as a maestro, what hope have his young students got?
And there are bigger questions even than Haitink’s: not just what makes a good conductor, but what do they do in the first place, and why does musical culture need them? Conducting is that strangest of jobs, something central to the vast majority of orchestral performances, and yet the men and women on the podium up there don’t make a sound. On the one hand, they’re mute time-beaters who can’t be part of the notes you hear an orchestra play. On the other, they determine the way the orchestra plays: how the players interpret the notes of the symphony in front of them is entirely down to what the conductor does, to the connection between that person on the podium and the musicians in front of them.
The seductive thing about conducting is that it looks so easy. It’s much simpler to do an impression of somebody waving their arms about and emoting to the music, and imagine you’re Arturo Toscanini or Carlos Kleiber, than it is to do a take-off of Horowitz playing Rachmaninov on the piano. How hard can conducting really be?
Photo: Bloomberg
Very, very hard, as it turns out in Lucerne. From more than 170 applicants for Haitink’s conducting course, 25 are chosen to attend the masterclass, where a final audition produced a mere seven “active participants,” who get to work with Haitink and a full-size orchestra for three days. The remaining students watch from behind the orchestra, picking up what they can from Haitink’s wisdoms and the successes and failures of their colleagues.
It’s tough enough just to get to the starting block of the masterclass, and what follows is even tougher. The young participants — from Russia, Spain, Venezuela, Denmark, Romania, the US and Hungary — are already experienced conductors in their own right. But the masterclass situation in Lucerne has unique terrors. Imagine how you would feel: an orchestra of seasoned, cynical pros in front of you, analyzing every flick of the baton; an audience behind you (all of the sessions in Lucerne in April were public); and one of the world’s great conductors on your shoulder.
It’s no surprise the first sessions with the orchestra are nerve-racked and tentative. Rafael Payare from Venezuela (you’ll recognize him if you’ve seen the Simon Bolivar Orchestra play — he’s their curly-haired principal horn, as well as an emerging conductor) conducts the tempestuous first movement of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony with a strange restraint, as if he’s scared to do anything wrong by Brahms or by Haitink. “Try, don’t give up,” Haitink attempts to reassure him; “in the forte music, you are too gentle. Too gentle. You need to be more gutsy.” The players of the expanded Festival Strings Lucerne are underwhelmed but courteous to Payare, and then it’s on to Adam Cser from Hungary. You couldn’t accuse Cser of holding back his enthusiasm for the finale of Brahms’ Symphony: he’s full of big, wild gestures that teeter on the edge of excess. “You remind me of my beginning time,” Haitink subtly chides him. “You do far, far too much. If you do that all the way through the piece, there will be nothing left, and you will get the wrong sound from the orchestra.”
Photo: Bloomberg
Next up is Denmark’s Christian Kluxen, who gets a troubling assessment from Haitink. “You have a lot of talent, but it sounds like you take everything too easily.” To show Kluxen what he’s doing wrong, Haitink takes the baton himself, and something changes in the air. The sound the orchestra makes in Brahms’ slow movement is now relaxed, the music breathes and flows with an organic line where Kluxen could only make stops and starts. It’s an object lesson in the difference that a great conductor can make. However Haitink did it, that’s what it’s all about. “Don’t think too much,” Haitink concludes. “Thinking is dangerous.”
Joseph Trafton is an effusive American who gets told he’s conducting like an opera conductor and paying too much attention to some non-existent “bloody singers up there,” rather than having enough contact with the orchestra. Mihaela Cesa-Goje, the only woman of the chosen seven, has problems freeing up her stiff right hand. Pablo Rus Broseta wins a plaudit from Haitink for his lack of ego, but the star of the first sessions is Anton Torbeev, who plays the whole of Brahms’ slow movement without Haitink interrupting him once. “Not good,” he says, “very good. There was a line from beginning to end.”
The participants themselves are much too well behaved to reveal if there’s any competition between them. Another Hungarian, Robert Farkas — not one of the final seven — does admit it was hard to come all this way and not to be chosen to participate, and to have to watch from the sidelines, but he also says you can learn a lot through seeing what the others do up there, and how Haitink responds. And over the few days, there are some amazing changes that come over the conductors. Torbeev’s progress isn’t the smooth ascent into Haitink’s affections that it could have been. His left hand is in an almost permanent state of tension, looking like a rigid claw, and despite Haitink’s best efforts, he never gets rid of it. “This gesture creates a wall between you and the musicians,” he says, interrupting Torbeev’s interpretation of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.
Payare’s trajectory is the opposite. “It’s like night and day, comparing your first time with now,” Haitink says on day three, clearly as bowled over as everybody else by the sheer chutzpah of Payare’s performance of the first movement of Bartok’s concerto. “That was brilliant, Rafael. This is your world.”
Payare explains the improvement to me later. “The first time, it was 3.30 in the morning for me” — he had come straight off the plane from Venezuela. “With the Bartok, I was ready just to play it like I would in concert.” That meant knowing the piece completely by heart, something that his teacher, Jose Antonio Abreu (who also taught Gustavo Dudamel) insists on. It’s the finest piece of conducting in the class all week, a fully realized performance that does justice to the piece.
In the other sessions, Haitink continues to try to get the windmill-like Cser to obey the maxim “less is more”; he attempts, successfully, to make Cesa-Goje’s hands communicate more of the music, and he is impressed with Trafton’s commitment, even if the American describes being up there on the podium with Haitink as being “like someone’s pulled your pants down.”
For all the brilliance of Haitink’s aphorisms and his genial self-deprecation — “I only offer this as food for thought, you can take it or leave it” — it’s the moments when he takes the baton that provide the real revelations during the masterclass. He implores the young conductors to “not be in your own world, to try and have more contact with the musicians,” and every moment he is conducting the orchestras is a realization of that ideal.
Haitink’s answer to how he does it, how he seems not to be performing or interpreting the music, but inhabiting it with every look at the musicians, is simply that he’s had 50 more years experience than these young people.
But it’s not that simple. Saying good-bye to the class for this year (he will be back next year at the festival in Lucerne with a different group of conductors), Haitink says, “There are so many ego trips going on in the conducting world. So to get some reason into young conductors’ minds is good.” He hopes participants are leaving with an understanding of the hard graft involved in their chosen career, of connecting with orchestral musicians. The lessons the young maestros will take away will be technical and musical and emotional. “I want to give them confidence,” he tells me. “And you cannot do it all in such a short time. The problem is, sometimes I tell them things, and I think, ‘What do I do myself?’ The questions never end with conducting. Even in your 80s, at the top of the profession, they just multiply.”
Note: To watch a video from the conducting course, visit tiny.cc/haitink
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