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42 | NEW STATESMAN | 23 JULY 2012

The Critics

Big showof hands

Suzy Klein

Music as Alchemy: Journeys With Great

Conductors and Their OrchestrasTom Service

Faber & Faber, 288pp, £18.99

At every orchestral concert there is a lone figurestanding on a podium. He communicates onlythrough gestures and facial expressions, turn-ing a series of notes on a page into an immersivesonic experience. For a performance truly tocome alive, it needs someone who is both sepa-rate from yet also part of it, able to weave a mul-titude of musical voices together into a coher-ent whole. That someone is the conductor.

For as long as people have made music to-gether, there have been conductors and the

practice of conducting has changed little overtime. For instance, documents from Sumerdating from 3000 BC list 64 female slaves at a temple, with one girl “in charge of supervis-ing the choir” and another who rehearses thesingers. In the Middle Ages, cheironomy wasthe name given to the art of directing musicthrough hand movements, indicating the shapeand flow of a melodic line to singers.

Gradually, conductors began using tools tocommunicate – rolled-up scrolls of paper,sticks and long staffs. The 17th-century Frenchcomposer Jean-Baptiste Lully was perhaps themost celebrated practitioner of beating time onthe floor, which he did with such zeal that on

one occasion he punctured his foot with hisconducting staff; he subsequently caught gan-grene and died.

As composers emerged from the shadowsof their patrons in the early 19th century, con-ducting became a celebrity activity. Beethoven,Mendelssohn and Liszt were not only famedperformer-composers, directing orchestrasfrom behind a piano; now they also stood infront of their players as the focal point of musi-cal activity. Then, with the birth of the record-ing industry came a new breed: “super conduc-tors” such as Otto Klemperer, Arturo Toscaniniand Wilhelm Furtwängler, who ruled with to-tal authority. The conductor was king.

Tom Service aims to show us how conduc-tors and their orchestras weave their brand of musical magic. He is a classical music journalist and broadcaster and Music as Alchemy, his first 

 book, is brimming with enthusiasm. Service’spassion is evident from the opening page, as hefeverishly recounts the first orchestral concert he attended, aged seven. Taking that initial loveaffair as his starting point, he explores six of to-day’s great conductor-orchestra pairings, fromthe painstaking, finely honed genius of Simon

Rattle and his Berliner Philharmoniker to themadcap, seat-of-the-pants electricity of theperformances of Valery Gergiev and the Lon-don Symphony Orchestra.

Orchestras, argues Service, are not onlymusical machines for reproducing the canonof western art music for the audience’s gratifi-cation. They are also barometers of social and

political change. A ruthless maestro such asHerbert von Karajan was a product of the Naziera, shouting at his musicians from the podiumat the same time as Hitler was screaming hatredto the wider world.

Now that we like our politicians and oursocieties a little less totalitarian, conductorsand orchestras have had to change, too. Theplayers of Berlin, for instance, have had to em-

 brace 21st-century repertoire, unlocked fromthe stranglehold of their Austro-German past

 by Rattle. The musicians of the Royal Concert-gebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam declare thatthey will not put up with back-breaking sched-ules or bolshy egomaniacs on the podium. In

a post-deferential era, conductors must engagewith their players and with society, througheducation and community projects. Today, amaestro must earn respect, not demand it.

The one quality all six of Service’s subjectsshare is a tendency towards obsession andworkaholism. Gergiev is a human whirlwindrehearsing in one country in the morning andconducting in another the same evening. He re-quires private jets as well as commercial flightsto fulfil his schedule. Mariss Jansons, we dis-cover, once had a heart attack on the podium inOslo but kept conducting Puccini’s La Bohèmeeven after he’d collapsed.

These insights, though, are not from the

mouths of the conductors themselves. DespiteService’s best efforts to coax his maestros intodemystifying their art, none of them elucidatesthe fundamental question of what makes anexceptional, alchemical conductor. “If a com-poser could say what he had to say in words,he would not bother trying to say it in music,”said the composer-conductor Gustav Mahler.

But this is an isolated disappointment inan otherwise excellent book. Service blendsin-depth musical understanding and analysiswith an armchair conductor’s enthusiasm and

 VIP access to rehearsals. The result is fascinat-ing – part concert review, part interview seriespart philosophical quest, as Service exploreswhy orchestral music has such power and howa group of musicians can harness it.

At the centre of it all is the conductor: theonly silent participant in the noisy adventure oflive orchestral performance. He has perfecteda kind of timeless choreography that plays outnight after night. This book shows us howthrough the efforts of this shamanic figure, livemusic can be simply good enough or, some-times, utterly electrifiying. lSuzy Klein is a presenter for BBC Radio 3

since, Jabotinsky and his heirs have been aconvenient foil for those, of whom Beinart isonly the latest, who believe that there was a de-cent Zionism and a decent Israel in the state’searly decades when it was ruled by Labour.

A case can at least be made that all this is thewrong way round, and that Israel has been crit-icised too severely in recent decades, having

 been criticised not severely enough in its earlyyears. After the 1967 war, Israel clung on to and began to colonise the West Bank but there wasno ethnic cleansing to compare with the expul-sion of more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs in1948 – in which “good” as well as “bad” Zion-ists participated. Both Beinart and Finkelsteinmention Deir Yassin, the village near Jerusalemwhere the Irgun, under Menachem Begin,

 Jabotinsky’s heir and a future prime minister,massacred more than a hundred villagers in1948. Deir Yassin became a byword – but Lyddashould be also. At that same time, almost all thetown’s Palestinians, nearly 50,000 in the vicin-ity altogether, were expelled by troops com-

manded by Rabin, acting on the orders of Ben-Gurion. In 1979, Rabin’s account in hismemoirs of this “essential” expulsion and howBen-Gurion had told him, “Drive them out!”,was censored by the Israeli cabinet (illustratingwhat Levin meant by both “crime” and “lies”).

All that casts an ironical light on the idea of “good and bad Zionism”, the purity of Labour,and Beinart’s touching conviction that earlyAmerican Zionists “genuinely believed that democracy lay at the heart of the Zionist idea”.The late Conor Cruise O’Brien became a com-mitted Zionist and supporter of Israel, but heremained an honest historian. Writing in 1985(and in the New Republic ), he said that “the

main difference between Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky, in relation to the Palestinian Arabs,seems to have been that Jabotinsky seems tohave been a lot more candid on the subject thanBen-Gurion (or Weizmann) judged it expedi-ent to be”. Events in 1948, and since, have con-firmed that. “Liberal Zionism is not a fantasywithin Israel’s 1967 lines,” Beinart says. But it would be if the balance of population had not 

 been so drastically changed in the first place, orif those driven out had been allowed back since.

Underneath the anguish of well-meaning Jewish liberals such as Beinart may lie a haunt-ing fear: what if Jabotinsky was right? Beinart quotes a diary entry of Herzl’s: “We don’t want a Boer state, but a Venice.” But maybe a Boerstate, an armed garrison surrounded by a hos-tile indigenous populace, was always the fate of the Zionist project, just as Jabo said. Much issaid today by high-minded Jewish Americansabout the necessity of preserving an Israel both

 Jewish and democratic. But mightn’t that have been a beguiling, impossible dream all along? lGeoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include “The Controversy of Zion”, which won an

 American National Jewish Book Award 

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