ALL ABOARD

posted by James Reel

    At the beginning of November, I started dumping out of Music Through the Night before John Zeck had a chance to back-announce the last selection before 5 a.m. It makes the transition from the satellite service out of Minnesota to me in the studio smoother, but the real reason I did it was to eliminate an opportunity for Zeck to do something that drives me nuts.
    Zeck and his fellow golden-throats at C24, the source of Music Through the Night, often neglect to tell us who’s conducting the music. I once heard one of the announcers stumble all over herself in an effort to ignore the conductor; it was as if she wanted to say his name, but some consultant was standing beside her, threatening her with a gag. I have, indeed, heard one radio guru informing the program directors panting at his feet that the conductor is not an important element to include in a break. Wrong, wrong, wrong. (This particular guru studied voice in college, and singers are notorious for ignoring the conductor.)
    Announcing that a piece has been played by such-and-such an orchestra, conductor omitted, tells us nothing. First of all, orchestras have no personalities of their own anymore. You used to be able to identify a Russian orchestra by its throbbing, blaring brass; a French orchestra by the quality of its woodwinds; a German orchestra by the heft of its strings; an Italian orchestra by its utter incompetence. No more. You may still find the distinctive nasal, woody timbre of central European oboes in Czech and Slovak ensembles, but otherwise orchestras have adopted an all-purpose international sound that can be adapted to the scores at hand—if the conductor so insists.
    The members of the orchestra play the notes, but it’s the conductor who shapes the interpretation (or presides over a blank interpretation). Consider the recordings of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 made over the past 80 years by the Berlin Philharmonic: No two are alike. Even those directed by the same conductor are quite different. Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1926 version is fast and efficient; his 1943 version, like most of his wartime performances, is incredibly intense; his 1947 version is more varied, and actually more similar to his 1950 and 1952 performances with the Vienna Philharmonic than to any of his earlier Berlin Philharmonic traversals. These are all quite different from Herbert von Karajan’s recordings of the Beethoven Fifth from 1963 (his best), the mid ’70s and the early ’80s. And these would never be confused with Berlin Philharmonic performances under Hans Knappertsbusch, Zubin Mehta or Claudio Abbado. If you have to choose between mentioning the conductor or the orchestra, go with the conductor every time.
    But don’t overstate the conductor’s authority, either. One of my other pet broadcasting peeves is announcers who suggest that the soloist in a concerto, like the orchestra, is “conducted” by the guy on the podium. Except in a few rare cases, like Karajan having his way with a malleable youngster or Alexis Weissenberg, the approach to a concerto is set by the soloist, and the conductor follows along. Remember the famous little curtain speech Leonard Bernstein gave in the early 1960s, humorously disavowing any responsibility for the interpretation of the Brahms concerto he was about to perform with Glenn Gould? When even a willful conductor like Bernstein makes such a statement, you know without a doubt that the soloist is truly in charge.