What I know about conducting music I could write on a match book, but I have long found conductors a fascinating breed. So just a few days after picking out my subscription concerts for the Albany Symphony Orchestra's 2013-2014 season, I came across a review of a book called "Inside Conducting" by Christopher Seaman. I was intrigued.
My first encounter with this species was some years ago when I interviewed then-ASO conductor Geoffrey Simon for this newspaper. As our conversation rolled to a close, he reached out and firmly put his hand on my nine-month pregnant belly, as if to magically imbue the baby with musical acumen. Stunned, I reflected: Simon's hand was the only uninvited one to attach itself to my belly throughout the whole pregnancy.
A few years later, wandering around Old Montreal, I recall a disheveled Charles Dutoit filing into the Notre Dame Basilica to begin a Montreal Symphony Orchestra rehearsal. I followed. He looked sour and tired, as if he had eaten bad yogurt for breakfast. And he treated the players as if he wished they had, too.
My favorite YouTube clip is of Russian minimalist composer Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky conducting Sergei Prokokiev's first piano concerto. He arrives on stage looking fretful, sweating and mopping his face. A series of Frankenstein's monster-like bobby pins scores his forehead to keep his bangs in check. As the orchestra begins the opening allegro movement, Rabinovitch-Barakovsky just wigs out, arms whipping, head thrashing, face grimacing like an ardent old-school socialist holding forth in an upper West Side coffee shop.
But what is it that these are conductors actually doing?
I mean, I've got a couple of good friends who are conductors. I love to ponder what they're thinking. Is it: These musicians are mine and I will mold them to my will? Or is it: God, help me, what do I do with the freakin' (and no musician ever says "freakin'," but this is a family newspaper) rubato?
And of course, I never attend an ASO concert without wondering if, when David Alan Miller and his wife go to weddings, he dances with her. I'm wagering yes, and that he's pretty good at it, based on his podium moves.
But what's the real deal behind the waving stick?
Apparently that's what "Inside Conducting" is supposed to decode for the music lover. But I'm more interested in the stories behind the baton. And one of the most apocalyptic is of the time an (unnamed) famous conductor allegedly gave a massive downbeat in a bar that was supposed to be silent and the orchestra did not play. Then a voice rose from the back of the violas:
"He doesn't sound so good on his own, does he?'"
(As a non-musician, I'm not sure I'm allowed to tell viola jokes.)
The truth is, of all the arts, the musicians get the best stories. Sure, there are some good stories about writers — Hunter Thompson's ashes shot from a cannon and Emily Dickinson buried vertically (easier to greet the break of Judgment Day).
But the musicians' stories rule.
Let's not forget that Debussy tried to kill his wife and then, thinking she was already dead, tried to rob her — and since she wasn't dead, things just went from bad to worse). Berlioz wrote those lovely evocative songs — "Les Nuits d'Ete" — about longing and desire, but he also had a totally whacked-out obsession with the actress Harriet Smithson, programmatically portrayed in Symphonie fantastique.
And the Italian Renaissance nobleman Carlo Gesualdo dabbled, brilliantly so, in composing. But he also bare-handedly murdered his first cousin/wife and her lover. Immune from prosecution, he simply left their mutilated bodies in front of the palace.
So what is it that conductors do?
Maybe they try, a la "Ghostbusters," to keep the energy streams of the composer from crossing the ego streams of the players.
Maybe they stand there, stick in hand, as if to say to them: "We already know that you folks have the best stories. But right now, it's all about the music!"
Jo Page's email address is jopage34@yahoo.com. Her website is at >www.jo-page.com>.