Orchestra Conductors: What Essential Things They Do

For some reason I have been fielding the same sort of questions of late from many different correspondents; "Is a conductor really necessary for an orchestral performance? What does a conductor really do?" Some note that they have seen chamber orchestra concerts where the principal violinist (concert master) does a very clean job of conducting in the absence of any conductor, which gives rise to the question of why so much importance is given to the seemingly superfluous job in the classical music world.

As a rule, most of the conductor's work is done prior to any performance by the orchestra. The conductor's main job is to interpret and shape the musical performance. Although they usually use the same music score different conductors can have vastly different vision of what the music expresses. While the job of each instrumentalist in an orchestra is to play their own part really well, it is the job of the conductor to make sure that the instrumental parts being played all add up to form one coherent musical picture for the audience to enjoy. Good conductors have a clear vision on how he wants a piece of music to sound and can also incorporate or accommodate inputs from his instrumentalists during the rehearsal process so that the final musical picture that emerges is richer than what anyone involved had in mind when reading the score on their own. If all goes really well, then the conductor won't have to do much more than remind his musicians what they are supposed to do (and when they are supposed to do it) during the actual performance.

Conductors are quite a special type of musician who plays the hardest of all instruments to control; the entire orchestra! Conductors themselves usually play at least one instrument (typically either piano or violin, but there are exceptions, of course). While instrumentalists and singer only have to follow their own musical line during a performance, the conductor's score can contain as many as 30 lines (for each of the instruments being played at any given time) all at once! Conductors weren't really needed back in the older days before opera and orchestral music got really complicated in the late classical - early romantic period. You may still now see small chamber orchestras performing music from the classical or baroque (or earlier) periods without a conductor, but that is not going to happen in a larger orchestra that is playing something complicated by Wagner and Berlioz and their dissonance-loving successors (especially something by Richard Strauss who had something of a fetish with writing multiple melodies to be played simultaneously by many different instruments). The more complex the piece of music is, the more essential the job of the conductor.

Sample clip A: All In A Tempo

Just as different people walk with different gaits at different paces, different conductors have different ideas on just how fast or slow the tempo indicated on the score is, how the melodic line should be phrased, how rubato (elasticity of tempo) should be used, etc. He (there are many female conductors around nowadays, but I'll use the generic he pronoun just for convenience's sake) keeps all the musicians on the same page and gives cue when needed (some instruments that haven't been playing for extended amount of time during a piece of music may have difficulty keeping track of when they are supposed to join in). In performances of opera or music from the baroque or bel canto period where soloists are expected to ornament their musical line, the ornamentation used is usually either done by the conductor or by the product of a corroboration between the conductor and his soloists.

Sample clip B: Tempo and Ornamentation

A conductor is very essential in an opera performance since he has to co-ordinate the singers (and chorus) with the orchestra that can't see them (nor are they playing on the same beat... there usually is a time lag between the voices and the orchestra sound - more so in houses like Bayreuther Festspielhaus where the orchestra is buried in a deep pit in front of the stage).

He has to set and maintain a tempo that is singable and set the orchestral volume that supports the voices (and other weaker instruments such as the violins) without covering them with stronger instrumental sound (usually the loud brass). Not only must the conductor lead the performance, he has to also be able to follow his soloist(s) (voice and instrumental alike) when needed, and able to improvise on the spot to usher any straying singer/instrumentalist back in sync with the orchestra whenever they lose their place in the music. This happens more often than many audience would suspect, and even to the best of them. A conductor is expected to be familiar with all the built in weaknesses of each instruments (voices included) he is conducting and to be able to spot developing problems and resolve them (ideally) without the audiences notice.

I have also been asked how to tell the difference between a good conductor and a not so good one when listening to classical performances. To which I'll have to say that it is easier to tell a great conductor from moderately good ones, since they have such a convincing vision of what they want the music they are conducting to express that their enthusiasm and conviction will sweep the audiences up into the performance that even the old over-played piece of music one has heard 100 times before will all of the sudden sound fresh and new. A different accent here that perks your curiosity, a different dynamic there that lures you to consider the same piece of melody from a different point of view that you had never examined from before.

Telling bad conductors from mediocre ones, on the other hand, can be difficult when the music being performed isn't very complicated (so much so that it is hard to tell if the orchestra is following the conductor or if it is the other way around). It is when the music is complex and full of dissonance that an orchestra can't get away with having a bad leader on the podium in front of it. When performing something like Stravinsky's Rites of Spring the conductor is either able to keep track of the overall shape of the piece and can cue his instrumentalists to keep coming in at all the unlikely places in the music.... or he can't.

Though it makes life easier for everyone when a conductor has a clean and easy to decipher baton technique, one shouldn't be tempted to consider a conductor 'good' or 'bad' based on how clear his conducting mechanics are or on whether he conducts from memory or with the aid of the score, though. I should note, of course, that there are great conductors around who don't use any baton at all when conducting. So the absence of a baton isn't a legitimate sign of bad conductors either!

Herbert von Karajan was rather infamous to many musicians who performed with him for his (more than) occasional lack of decipherable beats during a performance and for his habit of conducting without a score. Many opera singers did legitimately complain about the difficulty of reading his cue and the lack of safety net in the form of the score (Birgit Nilsson, for one, writes in her memoir about how he was unable to help cue her back on the music when she lost her place during a performance of Tristan und Isolde because he wasn't using the score himself), but what sane person is willing to dismiss Karajan as a bad conductor? Karajan's nearly undecipherable beat wasn't an issue in his performances with the Berlin Philharmonics because he had such a long working relationship with that orchestra that all the players there knew his body language by heart.

To sum it all up, the followings are signs of insufficiently prolific conductor during an orchestra/opera performance:
- Lack of cohesion and/or coherence in overall musical performance
- Multiple instrumental/vocal miscues
- Saggingly draggy tempo that leave instrumentalist/vocalist gasping for air
- Breathlessly car-wrecky overly speeding tempo with instrumentalists struggling to keep pace
- Instrumentalist/vocalist unable to catch up to the orchestra after a mistake
- Overly loud brass section drowning out weaker instruments
- When the big picture of the performance is allowed to be hijacked by a soloist at the cost of dramatic tension
- When dramatic solo instrumental/vocal passages are drown out by the orchestra

Sources: