Reading multiple choice

Audiences, understandably, judge conductors by what they see: the raised baton, the sweep of an arm, the occasional theatrical shudder during a quiet passage. By the time a concert begins, however, most of my work is finished. If I have done it well, the orchestra could probably get through the performance without me. That is not false modesty; it is simply what rehearsal is for.

People who have never sat in on a rehearsal tend to imagine either a series of inspiring speeches or a sort of military drill, with the conductor stopping every few bars to correct mistakes. Neither is accurate. A professional orchestra plays very few wrong notes, and those it does play the players usually notice before I do. What I am listening for is something less tangible: whether the second violins can hear the oboe, whether a phrase is breathing or merely being played, whether eighty highly trained individuals are telling the same story or eighty slightly different ones.

My most important tool is not the baton but the decision about when to stop. Stop too often and the players lose the shape of the music, and with it their patience; there are few things more dispiriting for a musician than repeating the same four bars while a conductor searches for the right words. Stop too rarely and problems settle in, becoming habits that are far harder to dislodge on the day of the concert. Early in my career I erred badly on the side of talking. I had prepared so much that I felt obliged to say all of it, and I remember a principal cellist, a kind man now long retired, taking me aside after a rehearsal and observing that the orchestra had spent more time listening to me than to Brahms.

He was right, and it was the most useful thing anyone has ever said to me. Since then I have tried to say less and to say it through playing. Often the most effective rehearsal comment is no comment at all: I simply ask for a passage again, perhaps a little slower, and the orchestra works out for itself what was wrong. Musicians are far more likely to own a solution they have discovered than one they have been handed.

There is also the matter of time, which is always shorter than one would like. A typical week might allow three rehearsals for a programme lasting two hours, and much of the art lies in deciding what can be left to chance. A notoriously difficult passage that the orchestra has played many times may need only a run-through; a simple-looking slow movement may need an hour, because simplicity exposes everything. Young conductors tend to spend their time on the hard bits. Experienced ones spend it on the bits that sound easy.

And then there is the question of authority, which is more delicate than the image of the dictatorial maestro suggests. An orchestra will follow a conductor it respects, but respect has to be earned afresh with each group, and it is quickly lost. Players can tell within minutes whether you know the score better than they do, and they are not obliged to be charitable if you don’t. At the same time, many of them have played a symphony dozens of times under dozens of conductors. Pretending that your interpretation is the only possible one is not leadership; it is vanity.

What, then, does a good rehearsal feel like? Not, as a rule, like a triumph. It feels like a conversation in which everyone has gradually stopped interrupting one another. Somewhere in the second or third day, a passage that has been effortful becomes, suddenly and without anyone quite deciding it, effortless. Nobody comments. We move on. That moment, unseen by any audience, is the one I live for, and it is the reason the concert itself, for all its glamour, is in some sense only a public record of something that has already happened in private.