Maestro and me: James Jeffrey learns to conduct the Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Think conducting just involves waving your arms about? The Sydney Symphony Orchestra invited James Jeffrey to try.
I have deliberately put myself in the path of terror a few times. I have bungy jumped, flown domestically in Russia, swum with crocodiles and sung to an Opera Australia panel. But, as I step on to the podium and look across the mosaic of expectant faces, I understand this is a different category of fear. This is like that template nightmare where you find yourself suddenly and inexplicably standing in front of 100 people, armed with only one certainty: you have no idea what you’re about to do. The only thing that convinces me I’m awake and not having that nightmare is — I quickly double check — I have my trousers on.
It begins with a white lie. A couple of months after I was innocuously asked if I’d like to have a stab at conducting the Sydney Symphony Orchestra — well, who wouldn’t? — a package arrives. In it is the score for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a CD, some diagrams of basic conducting moves and a note of truth-fudging encouragement from chief conductor David Robertson: “You have the same hairstyle as Sir Simon Rattle’s, so you should encounter no obstacles.”
Conducting the SSO1:32
James Jeffrey conducts part of Beethoven's ninth symphony with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra
The conductor’s art is not the most widely appreciated one. Or in the words of an otherwise perceptive colleague: “Don’t they just wave their arms around?” Heading up the stairs into the Sydney Opera House with a half kilogram of Beethoven tucked under my arm, I’m about to learn the answer to that is: no. Dear God, no.
Robertson greets me in his dressing-room, where he presents me with my baton, a glorified white skewer with a bulb of cork on the end. Yet it has the feel of power. “If one uses a baton,” said Leonard Bernstein, famed conductor of the New York Philharmonic, “the baton itself must be a living thing, charged with a kind of electricity, which makes it an instrument of meaning in its tiniest movement.” I observe that I feel like I’ve just been given my first light sabre.
“I’m sorry we didn’t get you one that goes vvvvvvvvvv,” says Robertson. On top of all his other talents, the maestro has nailed the light-sabre sound effect. As I give it a tentative flourish, Robertson cheerily rattles off a catalogue of baton mishaps: Georg Solti gashing his head; Guido Cantelli stabbing his hand; Arturo Toscanini simply snapping his whenever the orchestra gave him the pip, which was often.
But, in the right hands, this little stick can drive an orchestra of 100 musicians in full flight through some of the most complex music our species has created. Possibly even in my hands, at least for a few milliseconds. I’ll have to wait and see.
You have the same hairstyle as Sir Simon Rattle’s, so you should encounter no obstacles.”Robertson’s conducting career began at the age of 12, when a substitute teacher at his Los Angeles school asked if anyone would like to conduct their classmates. (“My hand went up.”) It has panned out well. Last month, Robertson won a Grammy for work with his other band, the St Louis Symphony Orchestra. “When they announced at (my children’s school) that I’d won a Grammy, all the kids who’d watched the awards thought I must have been hanging out with Pharrell and Beyonce and Sam Smith. It was like, ‘What did he get his for?’ ‘Best orchestral performance.’ ‘What song is that?’ ”
Robertson certainly doesn’t work any less hard than Beyonce; as I’ll soon see, he can even pull off some pretty memorable moves on the tiny dance floor that is the podium. But that’s just the start of it.
“When you’re conducting,” Robertson explains, “part of what you’re having to do is process everything in as close to real time as you possibly can. You have to both process the now, what’s going on right when you’ve heard it; and the things that are constantly getting further in the past, making decisions whether there are things that need to be referred to, whether it’s something you can do the next time, whether it’s something you need to stop on, whether there’s a particular player or section that has a problem and if they need your attention visually while the music is still going on. And then you’re constantly aware of what is coming so you can be prepared to make the gestures that allow that music to happen.
“So there’s this almost field theory way of looking at time, where you don’t just exist in the now, you exist in the present, past and future simultaneously. Apparently the stress level of conducting — I read this a long time ago — is equivalent to that of air traffic controllers. The difference is that if I screw up, nobody dies.” He pauses, then adds, “That really takes one of the stresses off the table.”
(Not that the profession has been entirely fatality-free. In 1687, before the baton had become widespread, French conductor Jean-Baptiste Lully was pounding the rhythm on the floor with a staff when he hit his big toe, which developed gangrene and killed him. Paradoxically, the performance had been to celebrate Louis XIV’s recovery from illness.)
In contrast to Solti, tellingly known as the Screaming Skull, or the baton-snapping, score-hurling Toscanini, Robertson is not a confrontational conductor, something he thinks is due to him getting into the conducting groove before puberty hit. “I’ve never felt that’s a good way to get results. It’s about creating an environment in which everybody feels not only that they can give their best but that they can take chances. Great things don’t happen without people really trying to take chances.”
As a lapsed French horn player (“Probably nobody’s loss in the great cosmic scheme of things”), Robertson values his time at the other end of the baton. “You know what it feels like to have the pressure of coming in and playing your part just right and fitting with everyone else, and that very definitely informs what you do when you’re up there on the podium.”
On top of all his other talents, the maestro has nailed the light-sabre sound effect.”Conducting, though, doesn’t have the horn’s comforting framework of routine. “If you are a conductor, there’s no way to practise. The only thing you can actually do is try to mentally get inside the score and know it very well, then react on the spot. And that is very daunting. I never practise my moves. Frankly the moves you do on a violin are infinitely more complex than the moves I make as a conductor.”
That said, during the concert at the Opera House two nights later, there will be moments when Robertson will, amid his wide repertoire of moves, look like a man being electrocuted during an earthquake. Not even Beyonce has tried that.
Hi, I’m James and I’ll be your conductor this afternoon. Today’s specialty is the fourth movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No 9.
This is the bit that contains the Ode to Joy, a melody so famous there are probably macaws in the depths of Ecuador that can squawk it. But just as the Eiffel Tower is girt by an entire city, the Ode to Joy is surrounded by other notes. Lots of them.
“With Beethoven 9, the thing that’s great with the introduction of the last movement is you actually get all four movements,” Robertson says.
“The first one, you just get people started, which seems fairly straightforward. But the ones where you make the (tempo) changes in between, that’s where the real art happens, and the beginning of the Beethoven 9 fourth movement is really tricky.” Oh good.
“I would essentially say you could do it in three (beats per measure) or in one, and one of the really sad things in this” — a giggle escapes — “is that there are a lot of famous pieces, such as the Eroica first movement and this one, which feel uncomfortable in three, uncomfortable in one.”
One is essentially an up-down movement of the baton, while three — according to my diagrams of conducting patterns — is a slightly fussy triangle.
“In one, you’ve got too much stuff going on, in three you’re beating like crazy and it feels like you’re flogging a horse that’s already running and you’re wondering, ‘Why am I doing this?’ ”
This question is ready to flit across my mind. I Iie instead and say I’m not terrified.
Robertson, a geyser of boyish enthusiasm, then guides me through with a lot of vocalising of the fourth movement. Regrettably, most of this will dissolve later as I walk to the podium; somewhere behind the double basses, I think.
Through the window of the dressing-room, sunlight dances on the water, ferries are chugging past — a glimpse of the terror-free, non-conducting world. Then a voice erupts over the intercom, reminding everyone they’re due on stage in 10 minutes.
You can actually teach someone to do this in five minutes, which is very humbling.”“In a rehearsal, I tend to be nervous in a way I’m not for concerts,” Robertson says. “In rehearsals, you are required by your job to stop the flow of the music, and that is by its very nature an unmusical thing to do. Once the rehearsal’s all done and I come out for the performance, I’m usually just thinking about the actual music.”
But then the maestro smiles and pops out another of his white lies of encouragement. “You can actually teach someone to do this in five minutes, which is very humbling, whereas it takes several years to properly master the violin enough just to play a basic scale, so there’s a reason people make fun of us.”
To start with, I park myself in the choir stalls, just behind the brass and the percussion, with a perfect view of the conductor. I feel safely anonymous until Robertson says, “And we have James Jeffrey here from The Australian to conduct you later.” I suddenly feel a sea of faces upon me.
Mercifully, Robertson swiftly sets them to work. As he explained earlier, “Part of your job is to make it so that the musicians have the best chance collectively to engage with the music and to get better as a group as (well as) they possibly can — so you’re also kind of involved in cognitive psychology. What is it that allows people to do their best, how do they perceive information and take it in, what amount can you give things, what’s the best way to handle the group dynamic at any particular moment?”
What I really notice is the way Robertson’s hair flies — in rhythm — when he really gets under way. At one point he is bouncing so hard, he appears to achieve full lift-off.
He’s an energy ball up there jumping about for 2½ hours; it’s a great aerobic workout.”A few years ago, David Peterson, the physiotherapist accompanying the Sydney Symphony on its tour of Japan and South Korea, was telling me about the importance of leading the musicians on a daily power walk. “What about him?” I asked, glancing up at Robertson’s predecessor Vladimir Ashkenazy, who at that moment was executing what looked like an interpretive dance move. “He doesn’t need to,” said Peterson. “He’s an energy ball up there jumping about for 2½ hours; it’s a great aerobic workout.”
And a varied one. In Robertson’s hand, the baton sometimes just pulses gently, sometimes stabs and slices great arcs. Then, all of a sudden, it looks like it’s being used for something as delicate as embroidery, but with higher stakes: a veterinarian sewing up a canary, perhaps.
Performing solidly in its support role, the maestro’s free hand adds emphasis and marks accents. A solitary finger touches a note. The hand pumps, it reaches out to pull in the sound, it grabs, clenches and releases. There are adjustments — an accent here, a semiquaver there, a volume adjustment. The woodwinds are too far back for Robertson’s liking and there’s some shifting. A note is moved (“I’m so used to an F here rather than an A. Would anyone mind playing F?”) The timpanist is asked to change to another type of stick. There’s a metaphor involving people in the water after a shipwreck.
Amid the heavenly sound, a French hornist releases the saliva from her instrument in a glistening rush, a reminder that this is an entirely human endeavour. The basses I feel in my chest. Light flashes off the maze of keys on the bassoons. Robertson hits the brakes again: “I’m thinking after the yum ta da da da, pipetta pipetta pipetta pipetta ...”
All these pauses and tweaks are like the scaffolding around a grand old monument, this mighty edifice of music that Beethoven never heard except inside his mind.
There are also some delightfully unexpected segues. When the flying saucerish acoustic rings (or “haemorrhoid pads”, as Robertson calls them) are lowered from the ceiling, the maestro glances up and, in a perfect moment of mimicry, quotes one of the green aliens from Toy Story: “Nirvana is coming. The mystic portal awaits.”
Then it’s back to Beethoven’s tempests and calms. And a final pause. “I just want to look at one more thing before we get a real conductor up here,” Robertson says, grinning across the forest of bows.
This is just a lark, but I feel fear. I think of those lunatics who tog up in foil suits to climb inside volcanoes and photograph the lava; if that were an option right now, I’d take it. And if push came to shove, I’d forego the foil.
Instead of foil, I wear a camera strapped to my chest. Feeling a little like a Borg from Star Trek, I stand on the podium and move the baton. Nothing happens. Have I missed something? A secret signal? After a couple of false starts and a helpful nudge from Robertson, I am haphazardly under way. Just me, a Grammy-winner and the Sydney Symphony in the main concert hall of the Sydney Opera House. I’d like to say I magically rise to the occasion, but that would be like suggesting Napoleon nailed Waterloo.
When you conduct along to a CD, everything’s already being taken care of — you’re just a passenger. Now I feel like I’ve been thrust inside the cockpit of an A380 idling on the runway and left to make sense of a half hectare of dashboard. I am in control and out of my depth. When I move the baton, stuff happens. Speed up, they speed up. Slow down, they slow down. Muck it up and it all comes apart. So much that is obvious takes on a revelatory quality.
There is panic, my brain dissolving into an arrhythmic miasma; the smiles spreading across the faces of the cellists remind me of a ski instructor the moment the depth of my incompetence became clear. I keep reaching for the training wheels or, more specifically, Robertson’s hand — Conductor App, as I come to think of it — which he briefly clamps on my arm to get me in the right groove. It turns out my right foot is bucking the trend being set by the rest of my body and is keeping good time. “Take that thing you’ve got in your foot and put it into your arm,” the maestro urges.
Then, for a handful of seconds, that sense of free fall abates and I feel tapped into the moment. I am driving a symphony orchestra and there are waves of Beethoven crashing beautifully all around me. In this tiny sliver of time, everything feels grand and wondrous and just as it should be. “Yeah!” cries Robertson. “Keep driving, keep driving!” I want it to never end.
The applause is generous.
Back in the choir stalls, concertmaster Andrew Haveron parks his violin and surprises me: “For those minutes you stood on the podium, you represented Ludwig van Beethoven in physical form.” Haveron, bless him, is unable to suppress a chuckle. “You have the hair for it. So you’re kind of representing the composer in front of us.”
(The idea of the conductor being a temporary embodiment of the composer goes some way towards explaining one glaring discrepancy in classical music where, despite the gender balance among musicians, there are so few female conductors.)
I am cheered by this, but then it goes downhill. “What we respond to most is trust. I’ll be honest, none of us trusted you at all.” Haveron sounds rather jolly about this. “It had nothing to do with the way you were moving your arms, it was the terror in your eyes, the ‘Oh my God, what am I doing here?” So far this assessment is entirely accurate. “While we were instinctively able to follow your arm movements, we knew instinctively that you were not to be trusted.” Again, firm but fair.
“If you look back in history at the sort of figures conductors cut, you look at Bernstein, you look at (Herbert) von Karajan, walking around with cashmere jackets draped over their shoulders, walking in as if they owned, well, they did own the place. The way they walk into the rehearsal affects the way we start to play.
“The hardest thing for a conductor to do is to have the conviction of their beliefs, to tell 100 people in front of them, who know the music inside out, that their way is correct. That is why they have such thick skin, and why they’re paid so much more money, because they have to believe it, make us believe it, and make the audience believe it. And that’s what they’re there for, otherwise it’s a committee.”
While we were instinctively able to follow your arm movements, we knew instinctively that you were not to be trusted.”Then it’s time for Haveron’s report. “For guts, I’ll give you 8/10. As far as your actual conducting’s concerned, it’s somewhere around a 1,” he says, before dangling a molecule of hope: “At the moment.”
If only it had been as simple as waving my arms around.
“In a sense, the complexities of conducting equal the complexities of communication between people,” says Robertson. “There’s a certain point at which you become like Wittgenstein — ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ At the same time, Laurie Anderson quite correctly in her response to that says, ‘But can you point at it?’ So there is a sense in which you try to bring out the ineffable, but you’re not able to do it, so you just point at it.”
David Robertson conducts the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in Holst’s The Planets on Saturday March 28 at the Sydney Opera House.
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