conductors – The News Desk

“I love my three orchestras,” the twenty-eight-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä said the other day on WQXR, during a broadcast from Carnegie Hall. Mäkelä was leading an all-Stravinsky concert with the Orchestre de Paris, of which he has been the music director since 2021. The other orchestras in question are the Oslo Philharmonic, which he has led since 2020, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, where he holds the title of Artistic Partner. In 2027, Mäkelä will become the chief conductor of the Concertgebouw, which would appear on any shortlist of the world’s finest ensembles. No conductor in modern history, not even the lavishly hyped Gustavo Dudamel, has ever risen so quickly to the peak of the profession.And now there are four. The Chicago Symphony, arguably the supreme exempl...

In 1955, Leonard Bernstein explored the art of conducting on an episode of the CBS show “Omnibus.” After leading a studio orchestra through the opening bars of Brahms’s First Symphony, Bernstein walks away from the podium and turns to the camera, leaving the orchestra to continue playing behind him. “Well, you see, they don’t need me,” he says, with an ironic smile. “They do perfectly well by themselves.” According to Bernstein’s script, which can be viewed at the Library of Congress’s online archive, the musicians were supposed to have devolved into dissonant chaos. On the broadcast, though, they carry on creditably for another twelve bars. This is a more plausible outcome: with signals from the concertmaster, an ensemble can navigate standard repertory on its own, as the conductorless O...

Tag: conductors

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