Conductors

Facebook brought me the news this morning that George Cleve died yesterday. I knew he’d had health issues for a long time, but this hit me like a brick anyway. I first worked for George in 1974 upon my return from studying at a rather strange school in Switzerland known as the Institute for Advanced […]

My orchestra had auditions for assistant conductor today. We saw six candidates for about 30 minutes each. It was an interesting experience, although not very enjoyable. A few I liked; a few I didn’t. But what struck me most was what always strikes me when dealing with young conductors; their failure to follow my two […]

One of the things that mystified me about the Dallas situation was the involvement of the NLRB; generally disputes between the union and management over contract administration are handled through the grievance arbitration process. Not this one, apparently: The union intervened after a January incident in which DSO management suspended without pay an associate principal […]

In this week’s edition of The New Yorker (paywalled, unfortunately) is a fascinating piece by Alex Ross on Iván Fischer, the Hungarian conductor and founder of the Budapest Festival Orchestra. While the piece focuses largely on his unhappiness with the current rightward lurch of Hungarian politics, Ross also reports on Fischer’s views on the orchestra […]

If you have been visiting Polyphonic.org over the past couple of months, you’ve probably seen the announcement of the Paul R. Judy Center for Applied Research that has been established as part of the Eastman School of Music’s Institute for Music Leadership. More specifically Center is now part of the Orchestra Musicians Forum and its […]

For the past month or so musicians in the orchestra world have been buzzing about Roberto Minczuk, the Music Director of the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).  It seems, at his urging, the orchestra management has decided to re-audition every member of the orchestra. You can imagine the outrage that this decision has […]

It must be that overwhelming wave of affection that greets them when they come to work every day: The sudden death of Jean-Marc Cochereau, the French conductor, has prompted the very readable music writer Norman Lebrecht to issue a warning about the health hazards of conducting. M Cochereau collapsed and died from cardiac arrest on […]

In my February 1, 2010 blog I wrote about the Baltimore Symphony’s plans for a  fantasy camp, (my words) for adults, and how the amateur musicians would be working with the pros of the orchestra.  It is the brainchild of Marin Alsop and apparently it has legs.  Two hundred fifty amateur musicians, now called “Rusty […]

Mathew Gurewitsch had an interesting article the other day in the New York Times on The Cult of Youth: IN the world of the contemporary symphony orchestra, youth is not so much a stage of life as it is a battle cry. Youth orchestras! Young conductors! At times it begins to seem that nothing else […]

That was the punch line of what is likely an apocryphal story about an interaction between the great German conductor Otto Klemperer and an Italian principal oboe. Sadly, Klemp is not alone. It must be hard to be a conductor, and I don’t mean that sarcastically. But one of the hardest things – judging by […]