On Conductors

| Nov 23, 2015 |

Many years ago, as a young trumpet player living in Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to occasionally play extra trumpet with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. It was a fantastic opportunity because not only did I get to play with a great orchestra, I also got to sit next to my teachers, who were also my heroes.

On one occasion I subbed for Mario Guarneri when the orchestra performed and then recorded the magnificent music for the ballet Romeo and Juliet by Serge Prokofieff.  This was before the advent of CD’s, and what was unusual about these recording sessions was that they were direct to disc, meaning that the entire side of the record was recorded in one take, with no splices. If there was any sort of mistake, the recording would stop and the recording engineer would have to re-tool or re-set, and this would take time and cost the orchestra thousands of dollars (this was 30-35 years ago when the term thousands of dollars really meant something).

One side of this recording began with the beginning of scene 3, which begins with horns, the third trumpet then enters, which I played, followed by other brass. The orchestra had rehearsed this, played one or two concerts with no problems, but on the recording session when I played my note the conductor, Erich Leinsdorf, stopped the orchestra and looked directly at me with anger. He first began talking to the celli. I leaned over to Irving Bush and asked if I had done something wrong, Irving said “no”, and then Leinsdorf said, ” Mr. Second Trumpet, why did you play the wrong note? Play your note for me.” I did and he said it was one tone too high (a note that cost the orchestra thousands of dollars), and so I corrected it.

Here is what is interesting about that story – Leinsdorf was recognized as being a great conductor, and a conductor who was extremely knowledgeable. Yet he had failed to hear my wrong note in both rehearsals and concerts. And I was playing a part that came from the orchestra library, meaning that this part had been played over the years for many conductors and was never corrected.

To me this points out that conductors are still just people and, being human, they can also make mistakes. When such a great conductor can miss hearing such an obvious mistake then I think it is appropriate that we allow less than great conductors to also be human and make mistakes.

And yet, there is a tradition of conductors as being dictators, and not benevolent dictators. As mentioned in an earlier blog (I was there when the Legend began) the french hornist Dave Krehbiel said that Fritz Reiner was like a shark smelling blood……..if he sensed any weakness in a player he would try to break that player. This tradition still exists, but it is far less prevalent today.

The good news is that today so many of the world’s great conductors are universally known as being nice and empathetic people……Gustavo Dudamel, YannickNezet-Seguin, and Andris Nelsons. But there is another side of this nice guy coin. I spoke with a friend who plays in a major orchestra in the US and I mentioned that his music director, a genuinely nice person by all accounts, seemed to be like one of the guys . “That’s the problem,” was my friends reply.

So it seems that to be hugely successful these days a conductor must walk a very fine line – on one hand, he must be encouraging and empathetic, yet on the other hand she must still have some distance between herself and the orchestra. This makes being a great conductor a difficult if not impossible job, and probably no one does it perfectly. But if a conductor tries to be humane and caring, then I think we should allow them not to be perfect. After all, they’re only human.