Maybe it's old news, but Grammophone Mag reports..........

[M forever]

I am not at all keen on Salanon, whose music making to my ears lacks passion or involvement. However, in an earlier post you suggested he had damaged standards in LA. How does this tie in with the excellence of their orchestral musicians, as outlined by the quote above?

What would have been interesting to see for you was him "conducting" the Sibelius symphonies in LA last year. While the audible results mostly lacked "passion or involvement", and the orchestra poked its way through the music without sense of direction and purpose - #2 was especially bad, at some point in the slow movement they were even in different places for a while, #5 just didn't happen but wasn't too bad as a runthrough although not much of the very fine detail, such as the very detailed string writing in the development of the first and in the third movement was simply very smudgy (I sat in the 4th row or so and could hear that a large part of the violin sections spread out before me didn't play together and what they played wasn't very precise either), although #1 did actually take off quite well - anyway, while all this univolved and mediocre music making was going on, and from hearing that you would probably picture someone standing in front of the orchestra, beating time in a bored and sluggy way, the maestro actually freaked out in front of the band, gestured and grimaced wildy, as if he had just been injected with some vicious snake poison. It was particularly sad to experience this bad show in conjunction with the uninteresting, boring, and almost amateurishly insecure playing.

I am not quite sure I understand your question since you have yourself participated in professional musical performances and therefore know that the technical and musical capabilities of the individual performers can only unfold their full potential when their efforts are properly directed and tied together in a coherent concept. You can have dozens of great musicians play together, but if there is no competent direction which channels their individual contributions into one coherent interpretation, into a clearly defined "musical space" in which the individual members can place the best of their contributions in ways which display individuality yet still fit together and add up, the result is pretty much random and "lowest common denominator" playing, when the musicians for lack of direction just have to get through the piece somehow without being able to aim for the musically special, the fine nuances, those moments in which a large group of people suddenly plays together with single clear musical purpose, with as much individuality and nuance as a small chamber group, in other words, when it goes beyond the right notes at the right time and something musically special "happens".

In order for that to happen, you don't just need highly competent players. Because there are so many, perhaps infinite variations of how a complex piece of music can be played on the macro and micro musical levels, you simply need a conductor who doesn't just roughly coordinate the playing and who makes some basic decisions such as tempi, you need a conductor who has a very clear, detailed, reflected, and coherent idea of the music that is structured down into the last detail. The main task of the conductor is to develop that concept and then communicate it to the musicians in rehearsal. That often necessitates going into the fine detail and knowing exactly how that fine detail can be shaped in the way so that it all adds up to that envisioned coherent whole. That is where a lot of conductors seriously lack. They simply don't have that kind of detailed idea and they often lack the craftsmanhip to work out the details when rehearsing the orchestra. Again, a lot of that simply "works" out of the box because of the high level of professional orchestral musicians today, but that often leads to conductors not even addressing it anymore because it already "works" somehow, at least good enough to pass as, well, good enough not to disturb the flow of events. They can then concentrate more on the bigger, superficial effects, on their choreography, on applying a few "highlights" here and there, and that is usually as far and as good as it gets.

Orchestral standards sag under this lack of professionalism no matter how good the individual orchestra members are. Some sag quicker and more easily while some are much more robust, that depends mostly on how deep the playing traditions and the uniformity of style is in the group. And neither is very deep in the LAP which is why they have unfortunately more or less completely lost the characteristic sound they once had. They used to have a darker and deeper sound than most American orchestras while at the same time not losing the compactness and sharp outlines typical for these. That was actually in part Mehta's doing who worked very hard on achieving a kind of "Viennese" sound there, although the tendency towards that style was there before him as can be heard in pre-Mehta recordings. Interestingly though, a friend of mine from LA told me that they never sounded as good as on the Decca recordings from the 70s but that the live performances were often fairly rough and underrehearsed, more geared towards a generally creamy widescreen sound achieved by just generally sustained and broad, and, according to my source, often simply too loud playing. Apparently the Decca recordings were achieved with a lot of edits. The general tendency towards a rich, full sound was really fulfilled under Giulini's leadership as not only some outstanding recordings of DG (which could be just as much engineered and edited) but, perhaps more conclusively, a number of really excellent live recordings attest. And they had still had that deep, full sound when I heard them live with Previn and Sanderling in the late 80s and early 90s and in the early Salonen years.

But even the best group of musicians needs someone who constantly tries to improve the standards of playing and making music together, just leaning back and letting things happen somehow because they usually kind of work out well simply is not the way to achieve best results. That is also what seems to be the problem here in Boston. While the orchestra is technically  very good, they just don't play together well with confidence and individuality and a sense for a unified ensemble. Many, including some BSO members, tell me that that is still the heritage of the Ozawa era when actual rehearsing was reduced to the minimum necessary "for the maestro to work out his choreography" (actual quote from a former BSO concertmaster I talked to recently) and the orchestra receded into safe playing mode more and more. But sometimes they seem to try to come out of their shell, as I have seen in some recent concerts led by Levine and Gatti (though not some other maestri such as Haitink and Elder) and in a recent Pops concert under Williams, they played very enthsiastically and with great assurance, too, as if it was suddenly a different orchestra (there are some, but not many differences between the personnel for BSO and BPO, most of the latter are regular BSO players).

[knight66]

That was interesting and I agree with it. I asked, because I wanted you to clarify what to me read as contradiction.

I have heard orchestral standards rise with a conductor who is not really all that well thought of generally, because the orchestra liked him and would play well whenever he was around. I have also watched musicians basically ignore the conductor and work to some inner pulse, probably generated by an earlier conductor who knew how to rehearse and inspire them.

It is clear that who stands up there profoundly affects an orchestra over time. Even as a one off, a conductor can galvanise an orchestra.(As an aside, in The Guardian last week, their TV critic said he could not see the point of a conductor...and he had tried. They do have better TV critics.)

On TV I watched Previn rehearse with his orchestra and he was asked to start them off, then leave them to their own devices. After about three minutes they were still impressively together. The interviewer seemed to think he had hit on something. Previn was much too pleasant to explain how they were probably running through per his earlier rehearsals, but more importantly, that being together is only one requirement, the mind putting across a reading of the notes via an antire orchestra was the real issue. Assuming technical proficiency, it is the deep knowledge of the workings of the music and the inspiration to get the piece across in a relevent way that is the reason it is such a difficult profession.

Mike