“You were born to conduct!”
“It’s too late now,” I laughed, “to make it my career.”
I was having my first conducting lesson with Maestro Maxim Eshkenazy at the Luzerne Music Center, a music camp for gifted students ages 9-18, ten minutes from the front door of my summer cabin in the Adirondacks. In 2015, at the Center’s annual fundraising auction, a new item had caught my eye: “Special Conducting Experience with the Student Orchestra,” for the following summer. Impulsively I bid on it. So did another woman. We kept upping the bid, to the delight of the guests, providing the only lively auction action that night. I had no idea what her limits were. I skipped a couple of incremental rungs and grasped the prize. It was mine. Now what?
I was seventy-eight years old. I had studied a variety of instruments, beginning with the childhood basic, the piano, followed by the guitar. I’d added the harmonica, also the recorder, then dropped the harmonica and eventually the recorder, gave up the guitar, and began the mountain dulcimer while still keeping in touch with the piano — and always the instrument no one can touch with their fingers, the voice. I was and remain an enthusiastic amateur. But I had not conducted an orchestra! That was what appealed to me so strongly.
Maestro Ashkenazy gave me a crash course in the fundamentals so that I would look like I knew what I was doing when, as the first ever recipient of the LMC Award, I conducted the Luzerne Music Center’s Symphony Orchestra in a one-time performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Dance of the Tumblers (from his opera The Snow Maiden). He lent me his baton and demonstrated how to use it as a right-handed person: Raise it to shoulder height at the top of an imaginary line parallel to the right side and bring the baton straight down to emphasize the strong beats, move it to the right and back again approximately at waist level, returning the baton up to shoulder height.
“There are two critical moments in conducting,” he told me, “the beginning and the conclusion. Make sure you have everyone’s attention before you begin and before you conclude. Scan every single musician with your eyes. You have to know that they are all waiting for your signal. As for everything in between, you are merely ‘eye candy’ for the audience. You don’t have to worry about making any fatal mistakes with this orchestra! They know this piece by heart.”
I had a week to prepare. I printed out an enlarged copy of the score, used colored pens to highlight each section of the orchestra — the strings, woodwinds, brasswinds, percussion — and listened to a recording of the Dance again and again while studying the score.
Maestro Eshkenazy had a gig of his own the weekend of my debut, so I continued my studies under the baton of the warm and welcoming conductor Stephen Czarkowski. The orchestra and I had a chance to rehearse the entire piece, from the moment I would be called up to the stage to the moment I would ask the students to take their bows.
The actual experience, later that afternoon, was thrilling. For three minutes I “played” the orchestra as though it was one enormous instrument capable of a variety of sounds. It required my complete attention, but by this time, knowing the piece so well, I could let the characteristic sounds from one section of the orchestra guide me to concentrate on inviting another section in. I especially enjoyed using my left hand and arm, indeed my entire body, to indicate dynamics of emphasis and volume.
When the opportunity to conduct was offered again that evening at the Gala auction, it was difficult to restrain myself and let someone else win it. I restrained myself for two more years. In the summer of 2019, I bid and won again, but then Covid closed the camp for two years.
This past summer, on August 5th, the Luzerne Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Aaron King Vaughn, performed for an appreciative audience. I was given one of the most celebrated compositions of Western civilization to conduct, the Radetsky March by Johann Strauss Sr. It’s a piece whose name fans of classical music might not know but whose tune they would recognize as familiar. This festive march is traditionally played as an encore every New Year’s Eve by the Viennese Symphony Orchestra, with the audience clapping along on the beat, a custom that dates back to when it was first played for the Austrian officers in honor of Field Marshal Radetsky von Radetz’s military triumph over an Italian attempt to separate from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in August of 1848.
The March is not as inherently charming as the Dance, but it was fun, and so simple that I never needed to study a score — I just needed to find it on YouTube and listen to it several times. Nor did I even need to use a baton. (You can hear the results below.)
I haven’t decided yet how many years I’ll wait until I raise my hand once more to bid on the privilege and pleasure of conducting.
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Helen Engelhardt is a writer, storyteller, and independent audio producer, with poems and other writings published in Bitterroot, Dark Horse, International Poetry Review, Jewish Currents, and elsewhere. She is the author of The Longest Night: A Personal History of Pan Am Flight 103.
Great fun. The Radetsky March has always been one of my favorites from the Vienna Symphony's New Year's concert, and this performance did it justice. But the March has a grim side to its history, and for an ironic view of the whole Austro-Hungarian Imperial enterprise you might want to read Joseph Roth's novel The Radetsky March. (Roth, aleyn a yid, hot oykh geshildert yidn in zayn roman.) I loved the turquoise gown. You're the best dressed conductor I've ever seen.
Loved this story and the music! Warm regards, Helen
Alice Shechter