Bartok - Concerto for Orchestra/Brahms - Symphony nr. 4

I was terribly lucky to end up at the Kultur- und Kongresszentrum Luzern just when the Lucerne Easter Festival was in full swing. The building itself is a monumental, pharaonic contraption by Jean Nouvel which I didn't like at all. But there is an awful lot of good music on offer. I was thrilled to see that just that afternoon Bernard Haitink was concluding a 3-day masterclass with a bunch of young conductors. So I bought a 30 Sfr ticket and sat in for the final 2-hour session. The orchestra was the resident Lucerne Festival Strings and guests, working through Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra and Brahms' Fourth Symphony.

It was a sensation to sit on the first row, just a couple of meters from Haitink and the conducting rostrum. It is difficult for me to judge to what extent these kinds of coaching sessions reflect the genuine work of a conductor. Or what stage of the work it represents. From what I experienced there it is a surprisingly mundane business. First and foremost it is about keeping the orchestra together. That's partly a technical business ("do I beat this in two or in four?") and partly a communicative challenge. The latter has less to do with words then with an authoritative and clear body language and stick technique. One of the aspiring conductors held his left hand continuously limp which led Haitink to remark that he created a distance between himself and the orchestra, as a result of which the musicians played too cautiously. Others failed even to give a clear downbeat. The kind of downbeat - energetic or soft - communicated to the orchestra how they should attack the music. All of this seemed to be fairly elementary stuff to me, which didn't even start to come near something we could call a genuine interpretation of the piece. I've heard before that orchestras bristle at conductors who lecture too much, but in this session the communicative bandwith between orchestra and conductor was truly minimal. None of the participants to the masterclass explained their intentions. They just started to beat and numbly tried to incorporate Haitink's suggestions. Only once Haitink himself extemporised a little about the biographical circumstances in which Bartok wrote the Concerto in order to frame the bittersweet character of its Intermezzo interrotto.

So I wonder now whether it is possible to really come to the kind of otherworldly interpretation that Ivan Fischer and his BFO have recorded of this piece. There every detail seems to have thought through, and polished, without forgetting about the macro-structure. Or was this just a process of establishing a connection between conductor and orchestra and putting in place a foundation of what might later flower into something truly creative?

Truth be told, the level of the participating young conductors significantly differed. Two of the four would, I think, never make it into a genuine conductor. The two others seemed to have much more experience and flair in dealing with the orchestra (one of them, the American Joe Tafton, is pictured above).

All in all it was a very enjoyable and unique experience which gave me plenty of food for thought.