Conduct unbecoming

HAVING finally caught up with the television reality show Maestro this week, I’m more convinced than ever that the art of conducting centres on the combination of two essential assets: force of character and utter belief in the integrity of the score.

As we saw in the varied attempts of veteran actress-turned-cake-baker Jane Asher, musician Goldie, comedians Bradley Walsh and Sue Perkins, and newsreader Katie Derham, technique can generally be taught, and if things go wrong, a good professional orchestra – in this case the BBC Concert Orchestra and BBC Symphony Chorus – will carry on regardless, saving the day for an impotent conductor.

It happens in the live professional circuit. Just watch the odd occasion when the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is served a dud and you’ll see immediately a collective salvage operation take place as the musicians turn in to themselves and deliver their own immaculate version of the music – leaving the flailing conductor, of course, to take all the plaudits.

But what is really interesting about Maestro is seeing close-up what kind of approach actually connects with the musicians – what incites them into raising their game and making a real musical statement in the process. It isn’t about precision and clarity of beat (though these obviously help). Nor is it necessarily about body language, as Jane Asher’s grand theatrical posturing instantly proved by the very ordinary nature of the results.

The ones who really fired my interest by getting genuine musical responses were Perkins and Goldie. The music was in their eyes – they, themselves, actually believed in it, and knew in their minds what sounds to expect. Moreover, the miniscule snippets of their rehearsals showed them to be brimming with self-belief and confident humour.

I mention this because I’ve been watching closely the various styles of the many notable conductors appearing at this year’s Edinburgh Festival – not because of Maestro, but as a result of the furore which I and most other professional critics caused by dismissing the young Venezuelan superstar Gustavo Dudamel’s appearance with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra as naïve, vulgar and superficial. The former MEP Hugh Kerr even launched a blog on which to carry on the debate: www.theear2008.wordpress.com

It was without a doubt a shoddy display by the orchestra. But orchestras of this status (remember their exhilarating recordings in recent years with Neeme Järvi?) simply do not, as a rule, deliver ragged entries or woodwind squeaks with such regularity, especially in such a high-profile occasion as the Edinburgh Festival. Ask any professional orchestral player (I’m married to one) and they’ll tell you that an appearance at a London Prom or major festival gives them the kind of buzz that raises their game to Olympian heights.

So what was it that instilled in these Gothenburg performances – especially a shapeless rendition of Ravel’s La Valse and a colourless Copland’s Appalachian Spring – such palpable nervousness and anxiety, not to mention a visible heads-down approach by the Swedes?

One orchestral player I spoke to days later confirmed my suspicions that Dudamel’s podium style was more show than substance. Watching closely you could spot him subdividing beats to the extent they may have looked flashy, but meant nothing – in fact, they actually got in the way.

As for Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, Dudamel played it like one of his Latin American party pieces – rhythmically reeling and all out for effect. While there’s a case for colouring the finale with a dollop of the grotesque, this performance was so over-the-top, so over-egged, that it became a caricature of itself – not to mention being utterly predictable in the repetitious rasping of the trombone.

If it succeeded in working up the crowd – a cathartic ovation followed – it also wiped a very unimaginative waltz (where was its elusive charm?) from the memory. Dudamel was acting the part, not living it or serving the music. Jane Asher does that too. It’s the prima donna approach.

Compare that with the genuine chemistry that existed between Sakari Oramo and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, or the mature and feisty enlightenment of John Eliot Gardiner’s Brahms’s Requiem with his Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestra Revolutionnaire et Romantique. Or with Valery Gergiev’s visionary series of Prokofiev Symphonies with the London Symphony Orchestra, and later in the season his mind-blowing perceptiveness in unwrapping the psychological treasures in Szymanowski’s opera King Roger with the Mariinsky Opera.

There are issues of genuine concern. Has Dudamel been thrust into the limelight ahead of his time? And in so doing is he being turned into a fly-by-night wonder? Will he, in fact, survive?

The answer to the first question is that age should not matter. Dudamel is 27, just as Ilan Volkov was when he took over the reins at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Volkov, however, has a probing mind that gets right inside the notes and delivers performances of genuine intensity and servitude to the composer, without the histrionics. His stunning Messiaen performance during this International Festival was on a completely different intellectual plane from Dudamel’s, whose priority, it seems, is for a floorshow.

As for the second point, my mind is cast back to a 1980s book, also called Maestro, by Helena Matheopoulos, who wrote of the growing cult of the “virtuoso conductor” – promising young talent snatched up and pressurised into doing too much too soon and delivering “performances which, however technically competent, glossy, polished and superficially rousing, nevertheless succeed in communicating little more than mere energy and fail to reveal the true musical content of the works they so shamelessly abuse”.

Unless Dudamel is careful, he could burn himself out very quickly. It seems ironic that Sir Simon Rattle, who has ferociously championed Dudamel’s meteoric rise, is the perfect example of a young star who bided his time, choosing a safe, relative backwater apprenticeship in Birmingham and subsequent sabbatical study at Cambridge over temptations to instant stardom.

Then again, Dudamel’s imminent lure to become musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic – the very home of showbiz – may very well be a symbolic move.