Symphony Concert Without a Conductor

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 911, 25 January 1957, Page 6

Symphony Concert Without a Conductor

by

ARTHUR

JACOBS

IR THOMAS BEECHAM and Sir Malcolm Sargent are unlikely to be queuing for unemployment benefit, but it remains a fact that a successful symphony concert has just been given in Britain without _a conductor. The seventy-five members. of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, deciding to give their services in a concert to aid Hungarian Relief, themselves made the proposal to dispense with a conductor’s services. Perhaps, -fortunately, their own two resident conductors -John Pritchard and Efrem Kurtzwere not at hand when the decision was made. But they afterwards gave their blessing to the experiment. And when I walked to my seat in the Liverpool

Philharmonic Hall, Mr. Pritchard was in the lobby selling programmes to aid the charitable cause. The rehearsal which I had attended was almost more interesting than the concert itself. In default of a single man’s authority, how does an orchestra decide questions of tempo and interpretation? By discussion, of course. But the Liverpool players accepted the guidance of their violinist-leader, 33-year-old Peter Mountain. The danger was that they would accept that guidance too readily-that Mr. Mountain would become, in fact though not in name, an actual conductor. That would have been almost to repeat in miniature the historic process that led to the evolution of baton-conducting rather over a century ago.

But Mr. Mountain was well aware of the danger, and took care to run the rehearsal like a chairman and not like a dictator. He welcomed the suggestions of his colleagues. One of them in particular — the cigarette-smok-ing leader of the doublebasses — was outspoken. Slack rhythm was the error most noticeable at the rehearsal, and Mr. Mountain had to remind the orchestra of the. consequence of having no conductor: "We all have to think of the tempo all the time." During the tea-break at rehearsal, the players showed themselves happy. Playing without a conductor "makes us listen more," one young violinist told me. "Sev-enty-five pulses give better rhythm than one

pulse", another added. "When I’ve got a solo," a horn-player ‘said, "it’s easier to judge when to come in just by listening than by listening and watching as well." The players confirmed what every sophisticated concert-goer suspectsthat certain gestures made by conductors are musically superfluous and are aimed at susceptible members of the audience. And they criticised conductors who, they said, had made them replace the composers’ original ideas of expression by ideas of the conductors’ own. Sunday evening arrived, and with the British and MWHungarian national anthems the concert began. In a Mozart piano conterto, the soloist was the Hungarian pianist, Bela Siki. He indicated the tempo to the orchestra. at the beginning of each movement, but thereafter he avoided the hand-waving and head-wagging which has been made familiar here by such

practised pianist-conduc-tors as Edwin Fischer and Leonard Bernstein. The accompaniment was genuinely conductorless and highly agreeable. But the severest test came . with Schubert’s "Unfinished" Symphony. Here I, as a critic, expected that certain weaknesses would show in tricky points of expres#5n and balance. But I was considerably impressed. I noted especially a characteristic "exposed" slow passage for violins alone in the second movement. Very ‘often, in normal peprformances, this becomes ragged. Here, without the guidance of a baton, it was absolutely unanimous, By the time the concert ended with Berlioz’s Hungarian March from The Damnation of Faust, I was convinced of the success and significance of the experiment (which, aside from making British musical history, contributed more than £500 to the Relief

Fund). But there were special circumstances to be remembered. First, the players were already familiar with all the items on the programme-they also included Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, and an arrangement of the Trumpet Voluntary by Jeremiah Clarke, formerly ascribed to Purcell. Thus the sound-picture of what the music ought to be like was already in the players’ heads. Had there been a new or otherwise unfamiliar work to prepare, a conductorless orchestra might have been defeated. Again, none of the music chosen was particularly complex in orchestration or in rhythm. It had no difficulties of sudden stops and starts. "There’s a lot of music we couldn’t do without a conductor,’ Mr. Mountain himself told me, "for instance, nearly all the Beethoven symphonies, or the Brahms symphonies." He might have added that much old music, particularly that of Bach’s time and his predecessors, poses problems of performance which cannot be solved just by a general "feeling for music": a scholar’s expert historical knowledge is needed, too. Can an orchestra be expected to be an assembly of scholars? That exposes at last the kernel of the matter. The players in a perman- ently conductorless orchestra would have to study not merely their own parts but the full score of the music. Even if they were able to, the time needed for discussion would enormously prolong rehearsals, Even at Liverpool, with a programme of familiar works, rehearsal went necessarily more slowly than usual. A Russian experiment some thirty years ago with a conductorless orchestra was apparently terminated on just those grounds-not because it would not work, but because preparation of concerts took too long. Yet within the smaller bounds of a chamber orchestra, it is quite possible to dispense with a conductor if the players are expert enough. Witness the excellent recordings "made by the Zimbler Sinfonietta, an American group drawn from members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. And even this fullscale Liverpool concert was, on this particular occasion, and with this particular programme, as enjoyable as many that are given in London with an averagely good (but not a very good) conductor. Orchestras elsewhere-perhaps even in New Zealand? -will feel tempted to emulate the Liverpool experiment. Such experiments at least show that the conductor, though a thoroughly useful member of the musical community, is less than the god whom he is too often set up to be.