Opinion

There is a nice irony to the fact that the most silent musicians of all are required to be the best with words. Orchestras may like the conductors who speak the least, but explanation, correction and encouragement can’t entirely be done at the tip of a baton. Meanwhile, the public is perennially fascinated by the power dynamic at play when a single figure seems to conjure unity from the talents of a hundred individuals.

What do conductors do, and how do they do it? The best answer I have heard came from Bernard Haitink, interviewed late in life by John Bridcut. ‘I am very good at translating music with my hands.’ Conductors do a lot more than that, especially in the field of opera, but Haitink’s phrase elegantly outlines the paradox between the technical and ineffable elements of his profession.

So it is that, at a time when books about music compete for a readership ever dwindling through lack of basic musical education, conducting manuals and memoirs still hold a place in the market. Faber & Faber has recently published two contrasting examples. Alice Farnham trained with the Finnish magus of modern-day conducting talent, Ilya Musin. Her experience extends to opera houses and orchestras across the UK and Scandinavia.

Farnham has no glamorous post or record contract, so the cover of In Good Hands is an abstract design which tucks away her name in the corner. Meanwhile Sir Antonio Pappano gets a gilt-edged portrait, and a subtitle so anodyne – ‘My Life In Music’ – that it functions as a space filler. No introduction needed.

Sir Antonio Pappano on the cover of his memoir My Life In Music [ISBN 9780571371730] while top picture shows Alice Farnham, conductor and author of In Good Hands [ISBN 9780571370511] pictured in 2017 by Swedish photographer Maryam Barari

Open them up, and both books tread parallel if contrasting paths. Conductors are made, not born. Farnham became an organist and organ scholar, very much on her own initiative. Pappano was pressed into working for his father’s studio. She took conducting lessons at a formative stage, whereas he couldn’t conduct his way ‘out of a paper bag’ when he first stood in front of an orchestra at the urging of a singer he had coached.

Both books emerged from the period of inactivity and reflection forced on them by lockdown, and both authors are strong and practised communicators. Both are candid about their own shortcomings and generous in praise of others. Both of them, outlining their formation, detail the thousands of hours of study and practice that earned them the right to be taken seriously in front of hard-bitten professional musicians.

Choosing between them, though, I would unhesitatingly pick Farnham. It’s partly a matter of tone. I once saw Pappano give a 90-minute illustrated lecture on Puccini, sitting at the piano without notes, ideas tumbling out of a mind in fifth gear. The memoir, though, is written ‘with the help of Jon Tolansky’, and it shows, in many sudden shifts down from fifth to third, when the need is felt to explain, to polish, to translate from speech to page. It’s a shame.

Farnham shrewdly ignores the issue of gender, then dispatches it in a final chapter. She takes the reader behind the scenes to demonstrate that the theatre is still the best place for a young conductor to learn the ropes in opera and ballet, overcoming challenges of co-operation and co-ordination more complex than anything they will face in concert. This is something Sir Charles Mackerras used to emphasise, but it still comes as a surprise to readers outside the profession.

Farnham’s words are all hers, I’m sure. I read her prose and see her in rehearsal, inspiring her musicians with assurance and a dash of charisma. She takes a collaborative approach to her craft, interviewing other conductors including Pappano, who tellingly remarks that the image of the conductor as ‘a grey-haired demi-monster with ultimate authority is passé’. Whether sitting on stage or in the audience, you would know that you were ‘in good hands’ with Alice Farnham.