Tom Service attends a conducting course at the St Magnus Centre in Kirkwall, 2006. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
I'm writing a book. Since this is the project that will be occupying me for the foreseeable future, it's going to be a pretty consistent leitmotif of this particular corner of the internet for a while, so I wanted to introduce it now. It has grown out of a fascination with orchestral music, with conductors and conducting, and a desire to lift the lid on just what it is that those silent but apparently omnipotent maestros actually do up there.
Every performance you go to is really the tip of a musical iceberg, of preparation, of rehearsal, and of the hundreds of human relationships that go into the make-up of any orchestra and its music-making. And as with Arctic icebergs, about nine 10ths of that process remains hidden - hence the book's working title, Music Revealed. When you hear the perfected performances of the London Symphony Orchestra or the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, it's easy to think that they simply emerge in that state of apparent harmony between the podium and the players, as if there is a serene channel of communication from baton to bow, a magical, mysterious conduit through which great performances are conjured.
Thing is, though, these performances are made - they don't simply happen. They are fashioned in the crucible of the rehearsal room, in the fine detail of the interaction between the conductor and the players, in the shared history of the whole orchestra (just how is it that today's London Philharmonic and LSO, both mostly made up of British musicians in their 30s and 40s, have such a different sound and culture of performance?), and in the complex social network that defines any group of people who collectively put their professional and personal lives on the line in public, in the concert hall or opera house, a couple of times a week.
So, how to tell this story, to create this biography of performances (which, by the way, Faber will publish)? It's going to involve spending time with orchestras and ensembles in Britain, Europe and beyond, starting this summer in Lucerne, where I'll be with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, the ensemble that's hand-picked every summer by Claudio Abbado, for the two weeks leading up to their performances at the festival. It's hard to think of a bigger contrast with another of the relationships I'll be writing about, between Valery Gergiev and the London Symphony Orchestra. Watching Abbado and Gergiev rehearse and perform is an astonishing experience: on every level, from their physical movements (Gergiev's hyper-intense trembling and Abbado's sheer grace and power) to their intellectual outlook, from the way they talk to the players to the mechanics of their rehearsal schedules, they come from different musical universes. And yet the results, in performance, are equally remarkable, albeit for completely different reasons.
Watch this space, in any case, for more. For now though, a couple of requests: searching for DVDs of rehearsal footage, I've so far amassed, among others, Karajan (an amazing disc of him rehearsing Schumann's Fourth Symphony and Beethoven's Fifth), Leonard Bernstein, Karl Böhm, the two volumes of Warner's The Art of Conducting documentaries, and a revelatory video of Carlos Kleiber in Strauss and Weber (watch excerpts from it in German with Italian subtitles here). Any suggestions you have of unknown footage, however, as well as your own thoughts about your experiences either on the podium, or working under conductors, would be welcome!
Meanwhile, here's what pianist Sviatoslav Richter had to say on the subject: "There are two things I hate. Analysis and power. No conductor can avoid that." That, in a nutshell, sums up the problems, and the fascinations, of conducting.
