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Young conductors get a taste of the big time
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Twenty-three years after raising his baton in front of a world-class orchestra for the first time, American conductor Leonard Slatkin still remembers being almost too awestruck to speak. "After I played through whatever piece I was conducting, I was so confused I didn't really know what I was going to say." Slatkin told Reuters. "You're overwhelmed by how good an ensemble can be sometimes, rather than really listening and saying 'Ah, that wasn't the way I want it. Let's try to fix that."' Prodded by the memory of that awkward moment before the mighty Philadelphia Orchestra, Slatkin created the National Conducting Institute, which brings promising young conductors to the Kennedy Center in Washington each year and lets them experience handling a major orchestra for the first time. Now in his seventh year as music director and conductor of Washington's National Symphony Orchestra (NSO), Slatkin recently led a small group through three weeks of intensive instruction that ended with a free concert conducted by four of the participants. At a rehearsal two days before making his Kennedy Center debut, Steven Czarkowski, a graduate of Mannes College of Music in New York, struggled to find the right tempo for Brahms' Tragic Overture, pulling Slatkin from his chair at the back of the 100-piece orchestra several times to the podium to offer advice. "Keep the beat flowing," he said, urging Czarkowski to find the orchestra's "comfort zone... It's the Tragic Overture. It's not the Lethargic Overture." Later, Czarkowski said it seemed like he had led the orchestra into quicksand. "I couldn't get them out of that. Leonard came up and to me and he said, 'Don't get upset. Just pull yourself out. Get that tempo in your mind.' And I did that. And I tell you that was worth tuition for this workshop ... The sound just went together and it was so easy," the 26-year-old said. All of the participants have conducted orchestras before and some even have jobs now working with youth symphonies. But none of those groups are in the same league as the National Symphony. "It's a fantastic orchestra and an experience of a lifetime," said Shenyeh, a China-born former violinist who goes by just one name and who turned to conducting after a neck injury. "It's like your teacher gave you a Stradivarius and said, 'Why don't you play this?"' And at a time when most orchestras are looking for ways to cut costs, the NSO's willingness to devote of a week of rehearsal time to the workshop and put on a free concert is "amazing," he said. While there are other conducting clinics, the NSO project is unique in many ways. Participants get a crash course in the demands a music director faces outside the concert hall, from working with the marketing department and stage managers to set the annual concert schedule to meeting with the trustees and helping to raise funds to keep the orchestra afloat. Coach, quarterback and water boy"At least in America, there's a huge gap between the training you receive in a conservatory and what is required of a professional conductor," 26-year-old Yale and Juilliard graduate Jonathan Schiffman said. That includes "knowing what to do to please an orchestra and more importantly, knowing what's going to piss an orchestra off," he said. As the participants try out their conducting skills, they hear feedback about what does and doesn't work from five senior musicians representing different sections of the orchestra. At a lunchtime session backstage, assistant principal bassoonist Truman Harris urged the participants to conduct with conviction, even aggression if needed. "Sitting in the orchestra, that's what I want," Harris said. But nobody suggested a modern conductor can simply dictate what an orchestra should do. A conductor leads the orchestra, but he is part of it too and plays many roles. "Sometimes you're the coach, sometimes the quarterback and sometimes the water boy," said David In-Jae Cho, a 29-year-old graduate of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore headed to Germany this summer to study conducting. The four participants, and five others who audited the course, were selected from a field of nearly 150 applicants. They'll face equally fierce competition for those select jobs at the top of the classical music world. "For any decent assistant conductor position, there are anywhere from 100 to 200 candidates," Schiffman said. "You have to be really driven and you have to have a lot of patience because there are fantastic conductors who have been looking around for years to land on their feet." Copyright 2003 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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