All this stuff about gender of conductors actually obscures the qualities needed. It could be a fair old serving of narcissism is useful maybe a touch of paranoia.....I remember once reading a piece about what is needed and it had the wonderful final line "knowledge of music may be useful but is by no means a prerequisite". Fact of life is when you stand in front of a professional orchestra baton in hand there are going to be better musicians than you in the orchestra, you are the person who has to decide the tempi, interpretation etc but woe on the person be it male or female who thinks they are God - orchestras can spot charlatans at 100 paces. I remember once playing for a pretty well known conductor and we were rehearsing a Beethoven Symphony. I can remember thinking, as he corrected several wrong notes in the woodwind parts during the rehearsal, gosh he MUST be good as I did not spot that from the depths of the viola section. I also noticed muttering from the wind. At the break I sat with some of the wind players and they said that these were well known wrong notes in the parts, but in this set of parts they had been corrected already - they were playing the right notes. Their feelings about this maestro amounted to a pretty big raspberry.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 15:02:25 +0000
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