Many times, non-musical friends have asked me what the point of a conductor is. Now, there are many jokes within the profession on precisely this topic, and if you corner a member of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales after a concert, they will be only to happy to regale you with a choice selection of them.
The role of the conductor is a topic I've looked at previously in this blog, but after a few days of rehearsals with our Conductor Laureate, Tadaaki Otaka, there is one aspect of this role I want to revisit.
You will often hear musicians saying of a great conductor that he/she has wonderful 'hands'. It seems a bit obvious doesn't it? The hands and arms are the bits that get waved around in front of us; therefore, a conductor should have absolute control over them.
However, there is a greater subtlety in this. A conductor's hands should not just tell you which beat of a bar you are on, they should tell you everything you need to know about the expression of the music.
Without getting excessively poetic (though my friends will tell you, I love getting a bit poetic) - it's a bit like ballet. In ballet, the arms so often tell the story; think, for example, the wonderful scene in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake where Odette intimates to Prince Siegfried the details of Von Rothbart's enchantment. Similarly, a really good conductor's hands and arms convey to their orchestra more than a thousand words.
But, how does a conductor achieve this? It's not like we can all cosy up for a game of Charades half way through Bruckner 7!
For me, Otaka is a wonderful example of how to achieve this level of communication. His hands and arms have such grace - he can show you the length of a phrase simply by extending an arm with the tempo and the contour of the musical line, giving the music natural pace, allowing phrase to grow homogeneously from preceding phrase, with no unnecessary tension disrupting the lines.
There is also something special in the 'weight' of his hands. Up beats and down beats should not just convince the performer of the tempo, but must also convey to them the character in which they are to play. This 'inhalation' and 'exhalation', if you will, is so important for the structural integrity of the music that we perform, but tempo without character is like an architect's blueprint for a beautiful building that is never realised.
A conductor should be, above all things, a communicator, firstly to their orchestra, and secondly to the audience; it is the orchestra that the audience hears, therefore, it is they who must first and foremost understand what the conductor wants.
Conductor histrionics on the podium that are for the sake of showmanship give little direction to the orchestra. However, conductors whose every movement conveys an element of the music's expression, whether it be in the face, body, or most importantly the hands, are worth their weight in gold.
