CONDUCTING IS such a dark art that it’s always worth keeping some of its extremes in mind. Henry Wood, the founder of the Proms in London, followed an adventurous policy when it came to new music, and spent years pursuing the idea of bringing Debussy to London to conduct.
Debussy was not an experienced conductor and on the night of his 1909 Proms appearance he got so lost that he stopped conducting and tried to get the orchestra to stop, too. But, in spite of his very obvious problems, the band played on.
The great Arturo Toscanini, a controlling maestro if ever there was one, suffered a lapse in his final season with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra that had been created specially for him. He became immobile in an April 1954 live broadcast of the Bacchanalefrom Wagner's Tannhäuser, and, although the musicians kept playing, the broadcast was taken off the air.
The orchestra was disbanded after Toscanini's retirement, but quickly re-formed as the Symphony of the Air. It gave its first concert in his honour without a conductor, and also made a number of conductorless recordings, with repertoire including Dvorak's New World Symphonyand Berlioz's Roman Carnival Overture. I once made a copy of these for a conductor and asked him if he found anything unusual about the performance. He didn't manage to spot that there was no conductor involved.
Although we’re used to the idea of chamber orchestras being directed by one of the players rather than working with a conductor, the early years of the Soviet Union brought a collective enterprise on a large scale. Persimfans – its name is a contraction of its Russian title, Pervïy Simfonicheskiy Ansambl’ bez Dirizhyora, or First Conductorless Symphony Ensemble – was an orchestra that, between 1922 and 1932, brought the principles of chamber-music rehearsals to symphonic music, and, with no conductor to co-ordinate them, adopted an unorthodox stage layout so that the players could all see each other.
One of the strangest conductor incidents I’ve heard of befell the German conductor Franz Paul Decker, a close friend of the late Bernadette Greevy. As a young man, he took over an opera performance in Germany without rehearsal.
But when he signalled the vigorous start of Carmenwhat the orchestra actually played was the quiet opening of Lohengrin. So many singers had dropped out of the Carmencast, due to illness, that the opera had been changed. But no one had bothered to let him know.
* In a sense, Thomas Adès, who conducted the Dublin début of the Britten Sinfonialast week (NCH, Tues), is the polar opposite of someone such as Decker, who studied conducting and made it his career. Adès has done neither. Decker would have had to develop familiarity and competence in a wide repertoire before he got a chance to specialise – it stood to him that he managed to get through the first act of Lohengrin without a score. Adès can pick and choose what he wants to do, because he's not primarily a conductor. It's his reputation as a composer that leverages his opportunities to conduct. The normal rules do not apply.
Think of him as you would a cook who can prepare a handful of favourite dishes or ingredients to perfection rather than as a master chef who can consistently deliver the variety to keep the customers of a first-class restaurant happy. The apparent paradox is this: the dishes the cook prepares delight the taste buds every bit as much as if not more than the work of the chef.
Adès’s concert with the Britten Sinfonia was nothing short of a royal treat. In fact, if anything, it conveyed the impression that Adès already knows more about conducting than most conductors learn in a lifetime.
The first half was all about Couperin: Les baricades misterieuses(played by Adès on piano and then in his own chamber arrangement); T hree Studies from Couperin(Adès's orchestrations of three keyboard pieces); and Ravel's great homage, Le Tombeau de Couperin. The second offered Stravinsky arrangements ( Songs of the Nightingaleand Chinese Marchfor violin and piano from his opera The Nightingale), and the two Suites for small orchestra (orchestrations of piano duets), and concluded with Adès's 2005 Violin Concerto, Concentric Paths.
The programme was built on the notions of cycling and recycling, Couperin's Baricadescircling with dark mysteriousness, Adès's concerto suggesting surging undercurrents of a Brittenesque passacagliawhile sending its soloist (Pekka Kuusisto) on intricately detailed trajectories.
Adès’s Couperin studies and the Stravinsky suites both manage to pimp their material to an extraordinary extent, while still faithfully embedding the originals.
The performances were models of their kind, often playful, lit to perfection, with a tender vitality in the Ravel and an explosiveness in the Stravinsky that seemed like the musical equivalent of a paint-bomb. And, while Adès’s concerto is oddly anti-climactic, the performance of it was dazzling.
* The second Barrow River Arts Festival(Graignamanagh and Borris, Fri-Sun) brought a more familiar explosive dazzle from the Labèque sisters playing two-piano music in Duiske Abbey on Friday, before moving to Borris House, where saxophonist Evan Parker, a man whose high-energy improvisations are like the aftermath of an irresistible convulsion, helped open an exuberantly upbeat exhibition by the soon to be 90 year old English painter Albert Irvin.
The festival also brought a rare kind of vocal perfection from the five-voice German Calmus Ensemble, heard in an afternoon programme that peaked in Monteverdi's searing Lamento d'Ariannaand a high-jinks arrangement of Finnegans Wake and also in a probing account of Bach's Cantata No 150 Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich (Lord, I long for you) with Camerata Kilkenny. Music and words mingled in unusual ways in Marcella Riordan's readings from Joyce and Beckett.
The festival, which has ambitions to become an annual event, is one of the most intimate and informal in the musical calendar.
* The past week also saw a flurry of departureswhich will have major ramifications for Irish music. RTÉ announced the resignation of Christine Lee, the general manager of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, a woman who has brought new projects and musical flavours to the orchestra's work since her appointment in June 2009. The Ulster Orchestra has announced the departure of its chief executive, Declan McGovern, who will be returning to embark on a new project at the BBC, from where he was seconded 14 months ago.
The National Youth Orchestra is recruiting a general manager to replace Zoë Keers, who is leaving Ireland to take up a job as concerts and learning assistant at the BBC Proms in London. And Randall Shannon, the Arts Council’s opera specialist, has been appointed chief executive of the Buxton Festival in Derbyshire, a post he will take up in August.
