The last two days I have had the opportunity to observe two very different conductors at work. I saw Gerard Schwarz conduct the Seattle Symphony on Saturday the 5th of June. They did selections from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and his violin concerto with James Ehnes playing the solo part (he got off to a bit of a slow start, but all-in-all did a fine job). They also played Strauss’s Ein Hilden Lieben.
I’m pleased to report that the Seattle Symphony is getting better at ignoring Schwarz.
I know that’s a pretty harsh thing to say, but having been in a number of conducted ensembles over the years I think that to some extent I can judge him as a player. When I watch him and ask myself if I would find any of what he is doing useful as a player, I have to answer–occasionally.
He does good cueing, I think. I only noticed a couple of “thanks for coming,” after the fact cues. In particular, he likes to cue the violin sections at his extreme right and left (they were seated European style). He does this even when their part is obvious. I think he likes cueing the violins because it allows him to turn dramatically to extreme profile for the audience. But that’s just a suspicion.
He doesn’t like standard stick patterns. I know that in passages in the Mendelssohn works that are pretty clearly in four or three he assiduously avoided both patterns as taught to college freshmen. In fact, rarely did two measures go by with the same pattern employed in both. In slow music he dispensed altogether with beating time and more or less mimed the phrase shape. In faster music he seemed to be trying to conduct each rhythmic unit separately. When the music became more intense he liked to add beats to the measure. Sometimes as many as four or five extras. Never the same twice. He liked to give a lot of upbeats to big downbeat entrances–sort of the way one would conduct the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth if you wanted to conduct each of the da da da’s. He liked to follow that with a few similar afterbeats after the downbeat too. The orchestra just came in wherever they had rehearsed to come in.
We were pretty close to the front, so I don’t think the speed of sound time delay was much of a factor, so I can report that, although there was not actually any particular place to look for his downbeats, I think if I had to guess his favorite place for a downbeat it would be at about the two o’clock position in his egg pattern. His egg pattern was a big egg shape circle thing he did, one to a beat, no matter what the meter. I imagine many students of the art of conducting wish they could learn that pattern, as it looks pretty convenient to use when you aren’t sure what’s going on. He favored that pattern, and come to think of it, I was wrong when above I said there were never two measures the same in a row. He used the egg pattern quite a lot.
When I first moved to Seattle and saw the Seattle Symphony I thought they were terrible. But later I saw them under a guest conductor’s baton–someone who conducts in a more, shall we say, traditional manner. And I realized that the Seattle Symphony is a really good group. But every time I saw Schwarz conduct there were so many ragged cues and strange dynamics that I decided it was Schwarz’s conducting that does it. I may be wrong. In any case, I thought Saturday’s performance was good, but there were many instances of Schwarz appearing to try tempos and cues that were just ignored.
In fairness to Mr. Schwarz he struck me as a little more useful in the concerto than in the Midsummer Night’s Dream. I think it’s because it would be rude to jump and wave around too much when the spotlight is supposed to be on the soloist. And then in the Strauss, which is a much harder piece, he mellowed out again for certain parts–in particular for the difficult woodwind counterpoint bits in the first section.
If I had to guess I’d guess that the rationale is that for most of what they play–particularly for something as standard as the first Mendelssohn piece–the orchestra knows it so well that they don’t need the conductor, so he’s really just there to impress the blue-hairs with his wild flamboyance. Just like a real live eccentric musical genius. If that’s the case then I’m sure they were impressed. He even managed one or two fully aerial hops. Leonard Bernstein would be proud.
The next morning, Sunday the 6th of June (D-Day) I attended eleven o’clock mass at St. Mark’s Cathedral on Capital Hill in Seattle. They had the ‘Cathedral Choir’ singing with Mel Butler directing.
Being an atheist, I haven’t set foot in a church for years. Not a big one, anyway. And boy is this thing huge. This was, I think, an Episcopalian church, and even Catholics in a bad mood don’t have architecture as stern as this place. There were huge flying buttresses made of unremitting blank dark grey concrete and fifty foot stained glass windows with nothing but cheerless rectangles of lightly tinted glass.
But the organ. Man, was that organ something else. A real, bona-fide giant of an organ with 32-foot stops as big around as oil barrels.
But I digress.
First they played a Voluntary on the organ alone. Then conducted singing with the choir. But they were obscured behind some kind of rotating windows structure. I thought all was lost and I wouldn’t be able to see the conducting, but then they moved to the loft above and behind the congregation (by the organ manuals). Then there was a whole bunch of church stuff. Stand up, listen to a sermon… something about flying trapeze artists…? Strange. Sing a hymn from the little blue book. Sit down. Stand up. Finally some conducted choir singing that was very nicely done. The conducting was very straight-forward. You could always see the beat and you could always see the downbeat. It was a lucky thing we sat way in front, because otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to see the conductor. As it was I had to turn around to watch, and face all those stern faces, bowed in silent contemplation.
Then the priest fellow broke some communion pita bread in half. I hadn’t intended to do the whole body of Christ/blood of Christ thing. I’m against cannibalism, sort of on principle.
But you know. Everyone was doing it.
And besides, I hadn’t had breakfast that day and being a chump, I thought we were each going to get half a piece of pita bread. Needless to say, all I got was one lousy little tab of Jesus to hold me until lunch.
But I digress.
As an ex-singer I thought it would be pretty easy to follow this conductor. He mostly mirrored his right hand with his left all the time, but despite that, his beats were clear, his choir stayed together and he communicated through size of pattern and beat styles just what he wanted them to do, and they did it. In fact, the big chunk from someone’s Te Deum for chorus and organ (I’m afraid I missed the name of the composer) was really damned good. Excuse me–was really darned good. The only other thing to report about him was his tendency to nod his head at the choir. The more intense he wanted the music to get, the more vigorously he nodded his head at them. But the bottom line is that it worked. The conducting, rather than merely there for show, actually added a musical element to the proceedings.
Gerard Schwarz is bringing the Seattle Symphony up the the level of a true top-flight band. His avowed programming system–in which he tries to gain the trust of the audience with standard repertoire so that he can eventually begin to slip in the more adventurous, modern work–is laudable in the extreme. So it is only advisedly that I criticize his conducting style. In fairness, his methods are no more guilty of empty showmanship than those of any number of well-known and well-respected conductors, and his choices of repertoire as a recording artist are unmatched. But in the end, it is the conductors who place the music first and above all things in concert–even the blue-hairs–who rise to the level of real greatness, such as it is.
Evans Winner
Seattle, Washington
June, 2004