| RELAXING on a warm afternoon many years ago in his dressing roomat the Ravinia Festival--the North Shore suburban summer home ofthe Chicago Symphony Orchestra--Pierre Monteux was discussing con-ducting with his old friend Walter Piston. "You go like this," he said,giving his characteristically firm downbeat, "and they begin. It s verysimple." Then his bright little black eyes became more serious. "I re-member once I conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in the BeethovenFirst Symphony. No matter how I tried to beat it, we couldn t beginthe first movement together. You know, it is very hard. Even in theconcert it was not good. A while later, the Berlin Philharmonic cameto Paris with Furtw~ingler. The Beethoven First was on the program,so I went--just to see. You know how his downbeat was--a sort ofshudder sometimes. That s what he did, and they all came in perfectly." As an art reaching beyond technique, conducting can no more beexplained in precise terms than can Horowitz s piano tone or the lightin Rembrandt s painting. Real conducting, that is, as opposed to beat-ing time. All one needs for the latter is some technique and a certainphysical facility. Real conducting involves a lot more. Call it charisma,if you will--not necessarily the charisma that merely excites the audiencebut the commanding personal magnetism that so controls one hundredmusicians that their performance communicates musical excitement tothe audience, despite the fact that every player may regard himself as abetter musician and have a quite different concept of how the music |
内容加载中，请稍后...
商品评论（0条）