“What’s important is that the technical aspects of conducting all came from my father. He’s one of the very few people alive in that field who actually believes that there is a really strong technical base and need for a strong technical schooling that allows conductors to have a vocabulary and a way of clearly communicating what they want. In today’s world, it’s pretty much a dying art.
Most of the conductors who conduct today, they don’t really have technique, but they also don’t believe that there is such a thing. Right now there is this basic shift to believing that everybody who is kind of musical, and who has musical ideas, can somehow, through some individual power, communicate these ideas to the orchestra without studying or without having a formal education in conducting. And that’s why you have a lot of conductors right now who just can’t express themselves any other way than with words…
The test of does one have a technique or not comes when you cannot say anything, in a concert where you actually need to communicate whatever you want to communicate without words. Often these moments are very spontaneous, things that you need to be able to organise without previous warning or previous rehearsal. There are people who can do it and others, the majority, who can’t.”
Paavo Järvi in the Irish Times, December 5, 2023
It is nice to see that someone in a prominent position has spoken out about the masssive elephant in the music room!
It seems to me that the level of instrumental playing globally has improved to an astonishing degree over the last half century. Despite that – and this might be a somewhat controversial position – the musical level of conducted performance has not improved at all. If anything, connoisseurs with any appreciation of real phrasing and nuance listen to performances from well back into the last century.
In my view the blame lies squarely on an industry consistently prioritising celebrity over musical quality, one which has entirely embraced the idea that conducting is a matter of ego rather than skill. Technically illiterate conductors in prominent positions inevitably facilitate and beget more of the same, with the result that we have a generation of so-called conductors whose only means of managing sound is to instruct musicians verbally. They do not even understand that it is possible to manage sound any other way.
Even apart from the fact that such a method cannot possibly produce any form of truly live (i.e. improvisatory) performance on any remotely consistent basis, it wastes precious resources on an astonishing scale. In my view, conductors should not be allowed the privilege of rehearsal time until they are able to produce results without it, because otherwise, in reality, the musicians and conductor simply spend the entire time learning how to navigate the problems caused by an inept approach to gesture.
This process is destroying music from the inside and, I think, causing an immense amount of frustration among those who understand that it matters not only if music exists at all but how it sounds.
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