A Creative Game of Musical Chairs

“Conducting is a bastard profession, a dishonest profession,” Dimitri Mitropoulos, who was one of its legendary practitioners, once said. “The others make all the music and I get the salary and the credit for it.”

It’s a thought that must haunt many a young conductor who stands on a venerable podium for the first time, staring at 100 pairs of merciless musicians’ eyes, all of whom seem to be saying: “I could do a better job up there myself.”

Now, as if to answer Mitropoulos, the Aspen Music Festival and School has fielded an orchestra made up largely of leaders--40 fledgling maestros from 19 countries who today become the first wave of alumni of the American Academy of Conducting. They have spent the last nine weeks pinballing between the podium and the orchestra’s ranks, alternately practicing on their peers and learning what it is like to be practiced upon.

And so, in the breezy, sun-warmed dome of the festival’s gleaming new concert tent--all blond wood, white steel and bright blue trim--a figure pops up from the violin section in mid-concert. He puts his instrument aside, strides to the podium, wheels to face his colleagues and raises his arms. It’s a scene to warm the heart of every professional orchestra member who has ever scoffed at the overpaid numskull with the stick: The fiddling stiff has taken charge.

This is, however, a top-down revolution. The academy is the brainchild of David Zinman, who, when he retired as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and was offered a job as musical head of the Aspen festival two years ago, saw the opportunity to re-create in this tony stretch of the Rockies the immersion experience he had as a student of Pierre Monteux at his school in Hancock, Maine.

But the program that Zinman envisioned was less a rural musical ashram than an intensive crash course on the practical realities of his art, and a way into the quintessential cosmopolitan career. He offers advice not just on the fine grain of symphonic music, but on coarser, crucial questions of watching the clock, getting respect from the old and mighty, managing a career, and learning to give instructions firmly but without condescension.

The festival ends today, but some conductors will be invited back next year, and a few will attract the attention of orchestra managers who come scouting for talent. One or two will be given a chance to conduct the Cleveland Orchestra at the end of next summer. America has a new maestro farm.

Once Zinman had sprung his idea, it fell to his new colleagues to develop a practicable program. For starters, executive director Robert Harth, who runs the festival from a two-story Victorian house overlooking a duck pond on the school campus a mile or so out of town, had to find the money: $400,000 for student fellowships, teacher fees and administrative staff. Harth is a hearty man with a light brown beard who wears plaid shirts, continually nurses a bottle of spring water and does some of his winter fund-raising on the ski slopes. Having recently drawn in $37 million for the new concert tent, which opened in June, Harth decided it was too soon to set out cap in hand again.

“It’s pretty hard for anyone to want to fund a program that hasn’t started yet,” he points out, ignoring the Labrador retriever snuffling at the glass door of his office. So he persuaded his board to use money from the festival’s own operating expenses. “Now that we have a track record, though, I think it’s very fundable. There’s no program like it in the world.”

Once the festival had put the word out about its new academy, 200 applications came in for 40 slots (previously the festival was training three or four conductors at a time). Zinman, the program’s coordinator, Murry Sidlin, and the festival’s artistic administrator, Nancy Bell Coe, huddled in midwinter at Zinman’s house in the Victorian lollipop town of Cape May, N.J., to review the videotapes. First they culled the talented conductors, then they sorted their pool into a reasonably complete orchestra. The trick was to admit a critical mass of conductors, but not so many that each one’s time on the podium would be reduced to a trickle of minutes. To flesh out the ensemble, they enticed non-conducting musicians with 15 full fellowships and the promise of plowing through an enormous amount of repertoire in a high-caliber ensemble.

As the program slowly acquired reality, Coe encountered some unexpected problems, such as the Jordanian student who couldn’t get her hands on the required scores in the Middle East, or the recurring need to pluck ringers from the rest of the school to fill in for players-turned-maestros. “When your principal oboist gets up to conduct, you still need an oboist,” she points out. “The scheduling is gothic in its complexity.”

With the summer under way, Zinman plunged into the gritty task of honing his students’ technique. He is here not as a celebrity figurehead, but as a hands-on guru. “He conducts just five concerts in nine weeks,” Harth says. “That’s intentional. We want him teaching, we want him hanging out, we want him going to concerts.”

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One morning, at a dress rehearsal for one of the orchestra’s weekly concerts, Zinman, a squat man with a scrubby beard and a brusque sense of humor, paces up and down the aisles, whispering jokes, ribbing a friend about his burgeoning waistline and apparently ignoring the tedious Stamitz viola concerto blandly unfolding onstage. Dressed in T-shirt, khakis and sneakers, he looks decidedly un-maestro-like. Yet his ears miss nothing, and he peppers the young conductor on the podium with terse, peremptory comments. “Steve, you’ve got one minute and 37 seconds left, and you’re wasting 37 seconds talking. Go!”

After the rehearsal, he holds court. A student asks him a question about a Brahms Hungarian Dance, and Zinman starts singing it through, the two of them conducting a phantom ensemble. “I want to see your armpits,” he exhorts. “Big gestures!”

Later, with his acolytes dispersed and the tent glowing quietly in the sunlight, Zinman reflects that with the establishment of the conducting academy, a dream he has been nursing for decades has suddenly burst into being. “It’s already a success,” he says. “It’s much better than I expected.”

Until this year at Aspen, students of all ages and levels, from dewy preteens to experienced professionals, were corralled into playing for the benefit of their baton-wielding peers. The crucial new element is that with an orchestra made up of more or less adult conductors, everything works better. Never again will Zinman have to train a conductor to lead Mahler’s gargantuan Fourth Symphony with an 11-year-old boy playing principal second violin, as he did last year. “Now it’s as if they’re conducting a professional orchestra, and they’re also learning as they play,” Zinman says.

“In the old conductor program, you had the blind leading the blind,” Harth admits cheerily. “You had kids who didn’t really want to be there reading music for young conductors who were learning their craft. We had to press all our students into service for composer readings and to accompany concertos. It was not good for morale--imagine if you get pulled out of James Levine’s week!”

It’s an eternal problem: Training someone to lead an orchestra is an expensive, cumbersome endeavor, and America tends to rely on Europe to provide its conductors with experience. Harth points to the example of Alan Gilbert, a native Manhattanite and an Aspen regular who has spent virtually all his 33 years in the embrace of one prestigious American institution or another. The child of two members of the New York Philharmonic, he studied at Juilliard and Harvard, summered at Tanglewood, played violin in the Philadelphia Orchestra and apprenticed with the Cleveland Orchestra, under the heavy wing of Georg Solti. And when he reached maturity, he too went abroad: He is now the music director of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic.

“Conducting is the only craft in our business that doesn’t come with an instrument you can practice on,” Harth says. “There is a dearth of great conductors and very few opportunities for conductors to become great.”

Zinman is characteristically more blunt: “We’re falling down on the training of conductors in this country,” he says. “You have to identify them young, and you have to support them. Finland does it, we don’t.” (Coincidentally, the 21-year-old Finnish conducting prodigy Mikko Franck had just made his Aspen debut a few days before.) “Here, we’re able to identify the really outstanding talents and work with them in a relaxed, informal atmosphere.”

Informal it may be, but the workload is staggering. With a repertoire of 60 scores to digest and instrumental parts to hone, students have no time for the mountain trails and fish-rich rivers that attract thousands to central Colorado every summer.

“I’m putting in hours until 3 or 4 in the morning just to be ready for the next day,” says Stephen Czarkowski, a young conductor from New York.

Czarkowski is one of three students who gather, a little bleary and sweaty, at the end of a long day to discuss the new academy. They are not neophytes. Czarkowski; C. Paige Vickery, one of the few female conductors in her cohort; and Mario Miragliotta, a Brazilian-born Angeleno, all have conservatory degrees and the beginnings of careers they hope will hoist them into the select group of globe-trotting conductors. They are unanimous in the feeling that the summer has provided them with a level of intensity and scrutiny that a hectic professional life cannot. Miragliotta, who led a tightly cornered, vigorous performance of the overture to Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino,” went home after the concert and watched himself on video eight times in a row. The following week, Zinman would review the tape with him again.

“We have to take eight minutes of music and make something extremely special,” Miragliotta says. “It’s a huge challenge. The idea here is to make us understand conducting from every point of view. When we stand on the podium, we should feel whatever the musicians feel.”

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It’s curious to watch such an occult craft dissected. In our hardheaded, demystifying world, where judges ply their trade on television, and physicians and stockbrokers alike have lost their claim to exclusive wisdom, the conductor may be the only remaining member of the secular priestly class. He--and the conductor is still, for the most part, a he--turns his back to his congregation, raises his arms, and with silent invocations mysteriously summons forth music.

“There’s no such thing as a great young conductor,” the 36-year-old Estonian American conductor Paavo Jarvi has said. “It’s a contradiction in terms. I consider my life right now just a preparation for the music that, hopefully, will happen later.”

At the heart of the Aspen training is inculcating a sense of how an orchestra--that limitless agglomeration of physical and psychic parts--actually operates. Conductors work with a collection of proud and imaginative artists. To bind all that creativity and training into the straitjacket of a rigid conception is a sure way to mediocrity. A conductor’s preparation involves coming to a detailed but flexible set of decisions: about just how lugubrious a funeral march should be, how startling to make a particular wallop, whether an oddity in the score is a mistake or a masterstroke. But to enunciate these items would devour rehearsal time and irritate the orchestra, which tends to judge conductors by how much they can get across in silence.

Maestro means teacher, not lord, and today’s conductor is more guru than general. The great conductor possesses not just training, discipline and imagination, but a mixture of authority and charm, confidence and flexibility.

At Aspen, all this is conveyed in an atmosphere that balances solidarity with competitiveness, making future contenders temporarily dependent on each other’s goodwill. The orchestra plays together on a daily basis, so a collection of individuals quickly coalesces into a team.

“We’re with our conductor peers in a program that allows us to be part of each other’s growth,” says Vickery. “Sometimes when I’m playing, I sit there and think, ‘OK, we’ve just been spoken to in a way I wouldn’t do.’ And part of the experience too is thinking, ‘I’ve got to be ready to play piccolo in ‘Firebird’ tomorrow morning, and I don’t want to fall down for my colleague.’ ”

The program seems geared to build both humility--”As a conductor, it’s sad how much you don’t know,” Miragliotta reflects--and the confidence not to be hampered by inexperience. Young conductors are in a classic double bind: Just at the time when they can least afford to fail, they can’t afford to turn an offer down. If there’s one thing their early careers have taught them, it is the catechism of preparedness.

“You never say no,” Czarkowski intones.

“Even if it’s a crazy gig,” Vickery says with a nod.

“It’s not every day an opportunity will knock, and we have to be ready,” Miragliotta finishes off.