Tackling a fill-in role, and sometimes more, pressure brought out the best in them
By David Weininger, Globe Correspondent, August 15, 2010
In 1990, during Robert Spano’s first season as assistant conductor with the Boston Symphony, the orchestra was playing a concert at Carnegie Hall. Music director Seiji Ozawa had ordered that picture-taking be allowed only during the last minute of the performance, and Spano was charged with enforcing that decree. Vigilant in his task, he noticed one zealous photographer going for his camera before the appointed time. So the young conductor crawled over and tackled the rogue photojournalist.
“And I thought, how do you write up this job description?” recalled Spano, now music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. “You know, that’s the ‘other duties as assigned.’ ”
Impersonating a linebacker doesn’t often figure into the responsibilities of an assistant conductor. In fact, the job is usually all preparation and no action. The chief responsibility is to study the music being performed each week, attend rehearsals, and be ready to fill in for an indisposed conductor at short notice. It’s like an advanced seminar in which the exams come unannounced and count for way more than your final grade.
With three musicians who have held the post of BSO assistant conductor leading the orchestra at Tanglewood this month, it’s a good time to consider just what this job is – what it takes to be successful, where it can lead, and what it can teach. Shi-Yeon Sung’s concert last weekend was the final regularly scheduled performance in her assistantship, Spano takes the podium this afternoon, and Ludovic Morlot conducts on Friday.
All three agreed that a great deal of the assistant experience is immersive. “It may be obvious but I’ll say it anyway: The chance to live with a great orchestra is just the best education possible,” said Spano, who served from 1990 to 1993. He came to the BSO from a teaching position at Oberlin College, where he had already impressed with his kinetic, impassioned style. “And also to see so many other conductors – who succeeded and who failed and why, and to hear the orchestra sound change with different conductors.”
“It was my first job,” said Sung, whose tenure as the BSO’s first female assistant conductor began in 2007. “And I had a lot of opportunities [to] watch the conductors and the orchestra and the communication between them. . . . Most of all I learned what [the musicians] need, especially in an orchestra like the BSO, what they expect from the conductor.”
And there is the chance to work closely with a mentor. During one BSO tour, Spano accepted a last-minute offer to conduct a program that included Richard Strauss’s tone poem “Ein Heldenleben” in Toronto. Ozawa began dispensing tips about the piece in his dressing room after a concert, and the impromptu lesson continued in a car on the way to dinner.
“And then, when we got to the restaurant, we sat at the bar before dinner so that we could finish up what he had started to show me,” Spano remembered. “So, my first ‘Heldenleben’ was much better thanks to his insights. I mean, that was really a gift – that kind of teaching from vast experience.”
The BSO’s assistants also get to lead one program of their own creation each season. And there are two of them – most American orchestras have one – which allows the assistants to split the BSO’s repertoire as well as maintain some flexibility for other gigs. “That was very important, because as assistants in Boston, even though we were prepared and all that, we didn’t really have much to conduct,” said Morlot, who took on short-notice gigs in New York and Chicago during his assistantship.
Yet at some point, the call comes – the one that is likely to send a young conductor’s stomach toward his or her shoes. The assistant must step in, sometimes with a few days’ notice, sometimes with a few hours, and lead a concert that is expected to reach lofty artistic standards as a matter of course. Morlot did so three times during his tenure, which ran from 2004 to 2007. One Tanglewood concert included Debussy’s popular but difficult “La Mer,” which he’d never conducted before. “I learned the piece with them,” he said.
“I must say, it was very different from the experience where you build up your program with the artistic administrator and prepare it for three years,” he continued. “But it’s very exciting because the orchestra also behaves very differently. They’re very supportive. Not that they weren’t when I had other opportunities, but suddenly, you feel this amazing pride within the group that wants to make this happen.”
When James Levine had surgery to remove a cancerous kidney in 2008, Sung had to take over two difficult works by Elliott Carter during the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood, which was devoted entirely to the composer’s works. Even with a few weeks notice, having to lead Carter’s thorny creations could be an assistant’s ultimate nightmare.
Yet Sung, too, found great support from the orchestra, which had played both works in earlier seasons. “I had some sort of ideas and gave a clear beat,” she said, so “those pieces were not very problematic to prepare or conduct.”
Spano’s most memorable experience – besides the tackling bit – came in December 1991. He received an early morning call telling him that Ozawa was unable to conduct that morning’s three-hour rehearsal of Strauss’s mammoth “Alpine Symphony.” Then, in the afternoon, he discovered that Ozawa would also miss that evening’s performances of the Mozart Requiem and Stravinsky’s ballet score “Apollo.” Spano had never conducted either work and had no time to rehearse the orchestra at all.
“I met with [concertmaster] Malcolm Lowe and said, ‘I want to do some things differently. Help me figure out what I can get away with and what I’d better keep the same.’ And he was wonderful. He really helped me calculate the extent to which I could influence the performance with so little time.”
How did Spano deal with the pressure of the situation? “This is the reason for gun control,” he said, laughing, “because I think I would’ve shot myself!” Still, he added, “It was a wonderful ride.”
Those who flourish in the odd mixture of endless preparation and sudden action that is the atmosphere of the assistant conductorship often use it as a career springboard. Spano has gone on to become perhaps the most admired American conductor of his generation; he is about to begin his 10th season in Atlanta. Morlot was recently chosen as the next music director of the Seattle Symphony, a post he assumes next year.
Sung will return home to Germany after the Tanglewood season ends; she has guest conducting spots lined up and will serve as associate conductor with the Seoul Philharmonic for part of the season. Given the obvious talent and tightly controlled energy she showed here, though, a more permanent, high-profile position is very likely in the offing. When it comes, she will bring lessons from Levine about what a conductor should be – not only musical but personal.
“I remember when we had the first audition for the assistant position, he just said, ‘The conductor should be a human being,’ ” she said. “I learned from Jimmy not only conducting but also how he communicated with people, how humble he is. If he’s in the room or if he’s on stage, he’s not a very important personality. The music is the most important thing.”
When Morlot was asked what he would bring to Seattle from his Boston experience, he mentioned a bond he developed with the BSO musicians when he realized he didn’t have to work so hard to get what he wanted from them.
“I learned by withdrawing a little bit, somehow, and trusting that they will come to me, read my inside singing,” he explained. “And the smallest thing I would change in myself, they would read it instantly . . . And I think that’s where I felt I could grow more and more, spending time in front of orchestras at this level. It was a luxury that you could completely work on that – not only the music but also on trusting that people will reach what you were really trying to do.”
David Weininger can be reached at globeclassicalnotes@gmail.com.
