Music director urges musicians to go conductorless
OrchestrasFrom Erin Keefe, concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra:
Our wonderful new Music Director Thomas Søndergård suggested the idea of an Orchestra Spotlight series where the musicians of the Orchestra put together an unconducted program, because he wants to encourage the musicians to listen and react more to one another without a central figure dictating each beat and phrase. An orchestra is essentially a large chamber music ensemble, and working together in this way further hones our ears and ensemble skills, demanding that we rely even more on one another for musical and physical cues in communicating phrasing, tempos and articulation.
“While I will be leading several of the pieces from my concertmaster chair, this type of orchestral experience allows all the members of the ensemble the opportunity to be more active participants in the rehearsal process and to join in crafting our collective interpretation of these pieces.
“The program itself is an exciting selection of works highlighting the various sections of the Orchestra, and I’m excited that included in these is one of my absolute favorite string orchestra pieces, the Bartók Divertimento. We hope you enjoy the concert!”
The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra did it first.
Orpheus was hardly the first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conductorless_orchestra#:~:text=for%20political%20reasons.-,1950s,suited%20for%20non%2Dstandard%20programming.
It’s all very well to extol the virtues of going conductorless from the concertmaster position, where you have the privilege of hearing every player as clearly as a conductor does and where you don’t have to worry about sounding late. In my opinion, whatever you might gain in a greater sense of collective attention and opportunity to contribute ideas, you lose more in the ability to be spontaneous and flexible in performance. I’ve certainly played in performances when we would have been better off without a conductor! There are far too many poor and mediocre conductors who add little to nothing. But, perhaps especially for those of us furthest away from the podium, a good conductor really does add something very important to what we could do on our own.
Check out Les Dissonances’s Rite of Spring. Real music making. You’ll be on the edge of your seat
It’s actually a very boring performance, apart from the tension of the thing being on the verge of falling apart at any moment: not a lot of dynamics, no rubato, nothing special, everything played “safe”.
Agree 100%. There are the time-beaters who add nothing to the result, but interpretation by committee isn’t really the answer, either. The death this week of the great Yuri Temirkanov called to mind that a conductor with a definite point of view about the music in front of him/her can impact a performance in profound ways.
Nothing new here. The first conductor-less concert I heard was the Prague Chamber Orchestra some 50 years ago. I still remember how in-sync they were. In California the Kaleidoscope Orchestra has no conductor – and they don’t do only small-scale works. They brilliantly play the Shostakovich 5th sans maestro.
Try Stravinsky Le Sacre without a conductor.
Guess you didn’t see Gerry Feinsteen’s post above
Hah hah – that’s exactly what we’ve being doing under his ‘baton’ for years.
The Berlin Phil,Vienna Phil, Bavarian Radio,Boston Symphony.The all do it from time to time…..It certainly fosters a chamber music approach,which is the main ingredient for any good performance.
The MN might benefit from this. The string section plays too carefully and they’re a bore to watch and hear.
I heard the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra perform the Bartok Divertimento for Strings without a conductor, in fact they do not use a conductor. Also, noticed the principal chairs were rotated amongst the various musicians.
Joseph Szigeti wrote (in his autobiography, “With Strings Attached”) interestingly and perceptively about his experiences performing with the famous (at the time) conductorless Soviet orchestra Persymphans, particularly the shocking and stimulating contrasts he noted performing concertos with them that only shortly before he had performed with Bruno Walter or Furtwängler.
With Persymphans he noted at rehearsal “a workshop atmosphere generated by proud artisans bound together in the common task of making good music. Each man had the right to have his little say on occasion. Mutual respect, in the knowledge that careful sifting of the highest available talent had brought them together, rather than pull or favoritism or regard for past achievement (the achievements of orchestra players of high repute are often, alas, LONG past), giving them a serenity unwonted in other orchestras. Bickerings, backbitings, sycophancy had no place in their setup.”
Szigeti gave a world première with Persymphans — the Casella Violin Concerto.
Note that Szigeti is describing an orchestra assembled and established to be conductorless — rather like Orpheus — as opposed to a regular orchestra suddenly trying out what it’s like to not have a conductor.
How much rehearsal time did this conductorless orchestra have? The “workshop atmosphere” is all well and good, but rehearsing in those conditions does tend to be significantly more time-consuming. And sometimes, one needs a firm decision on how something will be approached, which is a lot easier when there is one person in charge who is listening very carefully, and not bogged-down in playing an instrument himself/herself at the same time…
Big difference.
Gennadi Rozhdestvensky mentions in some interview the Persinfans. As he tells it, they needed over 100 rehearsals, when 3-4 would have been more than necessary had they had a conductor. “What’s the point?” – he adds.
He also talks about the role of the conductor, the eventual inspiration that comes from the podium, the different sound a certain conductor can bring out, whether with the gesture or sheer magnetism, the combination of control and spontaneity, and the suggestive v objective beat.
I guess Rozh knew what he talked about, since he hardly rehearsed. Lenny conducts a Haydn movement with his face alone (as long as it was with the Vienna Phil!), but I’ve seen Rozh conduct an entire Tchaikovsky-movement with his eyebrows alone!
Yessssss cue in conductor jokes
Two sticks put him/her/zhe in back, take one away put him/her/zhe in front, etc
Chamber music is where it is at! I remember entering a large rehearsal hall prior to an orchestra rehearsal where a string quartet of string section leaders were in the four corners of the room facing each corner playing their parts memorized perfectly in sync. I stood quietly in the center so as not to disturb and was enveloped with a rare display of attentive, balanced and sensitive musicianship. Bravo to Maestro Thomas Søndergård for incorporating this chamber music approach to enrich the collective musicianship of the Minneapolis Orchestra.
It’s nothing new.
It’s also a lot easier to do with a small group, and very often chamber ensembles will have a boss or two.
Where the rest of the orchestra emulates the viola players.
Conductorless
As NBC after death of Toscanini ?
Frank: the post-Toscanini NBC Orchestra became the Symphony of the Air, independently of NBC.
Their propably most famous recording was the Van Cliburn/Kondrashin Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto in 1958.
It was disbanded around 1963, when some of the most famous musicians had left for other jobs.
Driverless cars anyone? Nobody is talking about how long it takes to rehearse a large orchestral ensemble without a conductor……is it merely hours, days or weeks and is this (covertly) about financial savings?
One wonders if Ms. Keefe would have been equally as excited about a conductorless orchestra during the time of the former music director.
Dictating. I love it.
And those damned composers. How dare they tell us what to play!
Why, they even write it down on paper and make us read it!
Most school bands are conductorless.
Yeah, there’s a guy up there waving his arms but they’re not watching him and they never did.
Fairly accurate
For those extolling the virtues of not going conductorless, I suggest you have someone do a blind test with recordings with/without a conductor, for instance Bartok Divertimento with Orpheus vs. an actual conductor and even the Rite of Spring with Dissonances vs. a whole slew of conductors. If you can identify which is which, or can find such a radical difference in the quality of the interpretation that going conductorless would seem unthinkable, then kudos to you. Are we seriously implying that musicians might actually be lost without a conductor and incapable of delivering a worthy performance? Anybody who might believe that is either not a musician, victim to a visual “placebo effect” whereby the mere fact of seeing a conductor actually results in confirmation bias, or worse, a conductor sycophant (there are many among audiences, and even more among orchestra musicians). In the whole history of mankind, there has rarely been a profession closest to the famous adage saying that “the emperor has no clothes” — I am excepting from this the 2 or 3 % of living conductors who actually do make a radical difference and who pop up once or twice per generation and who now tend to be in their 50’s and 60’s.
Persimfans was a conductorless orchestra in Moscow in the Soviet Union that was founded by Lev Tseitlin and existed between 1922 and 1932.
Its name is an abbreviation for
“Pervïy Simfonicheskiy Ansambl’ bez Dirizhyora”
(First Conductorless Symphony Ensemble).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persimfans