Book Review: Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras, Tom Service, Faber 2012

Music as Alchemy is writer and broadcaster Tom Service’s first book. In it, he describes a series of encounters with six conductors and their principal orchestras within the context of his beliefs about the transformational power of symphonic music. Chapter by chapter, he narrates his listening experiences of each conductor-orchestra combination over a period of rehearsals and performances in a chatty style aimed at the general reader and classical music listener. Informal interviews with the conductors and sundry orchestral players provide further access to this traditionally exclusive world whilst a smattering of information about the orchestras and repertoire in development paints a basic background picture.

The book’s purpose is to unpick the apparent ‘magic’ of these particular ‘great’ conductors; what they do and how they do it, described in poetic rather than technical terms. Perhaps it might more accurately have been sub-titled ‘My Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras’ as it revolves around Service personally; focusing on his subjective thoughts and feelings about his chosen conductor-orchestra pairings. His approach is to consider each in turn, observing part of a typical orchestral schedule as a fly-on-the-wall and marveling at the gulf between conventionally taught conducting technique (he himself once studied the ‘Canford Method’) and the arcane gestures which form part of the unique arsenal of every ‘great’ conductor. He discusses charisma and body language; how each conductor handles the orchestra musically and psychologically, how they view their leadership role and how the orchestra responds artistically and individually before assessing the musical results from the perspective of a largely enraptured, if not always entirely convinced, listener.

Disappointingly, Music as Alchemy glosses over issues of social and artistic relevance at a time when many orchestras world-wide are struggling to find funding in a climate of savage cuts to the arts. Rather, Service chooses to re-explore territory which is historically controversial in its own right - the relationship between a conductor and ‘his’ orchestra being notoriously tension-laden - but he does so in almost entirely positive terms; content to put "a happy family" spin on the ensembles concerned (to use Iván Fischer’s description of his Budapest Festival Orchestra), whilst adopting the rarefied, Romantic position that the ‘music itself’ and musical values are autonomous. Throughout, Service sticks to an idealised view of symphonic culture despite acknowledging that “conducting is about collaboration, politics and society”. Nowhere, for example, does he consider the controversial ‘museum’ aspect of a classical music culture in which a proliferation of orchestras depend on ritualistic performances of the same, familiar works from the past to ever-shrinking niche audiences of ever-increasing average age. The result is a text which props up the symphonic establishment with virtually PR zeal.

Moreover, the masculine emphasis on ‘his’ orchestra is a given in this survey, as Service’s roster of ‘great’ conductors are all men, even as he notes that increasingly well-known maestros such as Marin Alsop and Susanna Mälkki are no longer merely described as ‘women conductors’. Indeed, it is a very select, European few who gain inclusion here: from Valery Gergiev, Mariss Jansons and Jonathan Nott to Simon Rattle, Fischer and Claudio Abbado. Service justifies his choice on the less than convincing grounds that a) material is readily available on other candidates such as Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez (when Rattle, for example, has had huge exposure) and b) the sheer amount of space needed to do justice to more conductors. Clearly, lines had to be drawn regarding both the numbers and quality of conductors included - particularly in view of the personal nature of the book and focus on perceived ‘great’ (as opposed to ‘mediocre’?) conductors - but the loosely-written chapters could comfortably have been reduced in length for the sake of broader geo-cultural scope.

Service is careful to note that the days of the tyrannical, megastar maestros such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Arturo Toscanini and Herbert von Karajan are over; that, these days, a healthier, more democratic culture of mutual respect prevails. But his conductors are presented as superstars nonetheless; they, their musicians and even the music itself are lionised as culture heroes in terms that downright stretch credulity. For instance, he writes that Abbado

“needs his musicians to make music, to interpret his gestures, but more than that ... he needs their faith. Abbado’s body language is only translatable into sound because the musicians in the Lucerne Festival Orchestra believe that’s possible ... that Abbado’s gestures communicate everything they need to know about how to play Berlioz or Bruckner ... The fact that they know Abbado trusts them and has chosen them ... means they can safely go further into the music and their musicality than they could otherwise and Abbado himself is pushed to explore the extremes of what’s possible because he knows there are no limitations imposed by institutional politics or personal conflicts. That’s part of the secret of the musical miracle manufactured in Lucerne.”

Such heady stuff typifies Service’s idealisation of the orchestral environment and hints at his reification of the aesthetic experience. Throughout, he talks about music in universalised terms separate from society and ‘real life’, writing, for instance, of a performance of Gustav Mahler’s 6th Symphony that:

“Having looked at the music’s terror and fear and premonitions of death squarely in the face, it was possible to return to the world drained but renewed.”

Yet, at the same time, he describes music in exalted emotional terms as, for instance, in a performance of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique:

“We all became Berlioz’s doomed protagonist that night, wracked by obsessive love, experiencing moments of sensual joy and pastoral calm and then going through the fires of hallucinogenic hell until the ultimate extinguishment of our collective ego in the final moments...”

Emotional transport is often central to the hearing of extraordinary music and the impetus to share the effects of it on oneself is matched only by the paradoxical impossibility of doing so through the medium of words; Service is brave indeed to try and is clearly a knowledgeable as well as passionate advocate. But the difficulty here is that his grandiose, quasi-spiritual descriptions infantilise both the experience and his readers; moreover, he skirts uncomfortably close to condoning a kind of artistic submission and escapism despite his intention to encourage the opposite and, indeed, to de-mythologise the orchestral world. Submission to the composer via the score, submission to the conductor, to the collective entity of the orchestra and to the performative moment and a kind of ‘great mystery’ are all ultimately lauded as a means of giving up the self in order to transcend the self through ‘great’ music. Such utopian ideals of social or individual harmony are all very well, but it is arguable to what extent music sets out to achieve that - even if such healing transformation is possible in purely musical terms; a question which continues to resound, alas, all too clearly as we see in the chapter on the Berlin Philharmonic, in which Service recounts that orchestra’s shameful allegiance to the Nazis between 1933 and 1945.

Ultimately, it is not enough to suggest, as Service does, that transported listening amounts to active participation in the artistic experience; for that, one also needs a good deal more critical engagement than is offered by Music as Alchemy, for all that Service is not always won over by some of the music-making he describes. His book may open the door a crack for those completely unfamiliar with the workings of such cultural monoliths - and it certainly offers a view into an unfortunately wide-spread, romanticised mode of thinking about classical music and its performance. Nonetheless, it is a missed opportunity to gain deeper insight into the contemporary symphonic world at a time of increased global musical reach, yet urgent social and artistic challenge.


This is a longer version of a book review posted on Wales Arts Review 19/10/12:

 http://www.walesartsreview.org/music%20as%20alchemy%20-%20journeys%20with%20great%20conductors%20and%20their%20orchestras%20%20by%20tom%20service.html