Entertainment
The Maestro
By Bill Richardson published Dec 1, 2008
This has been an annus mirabilis in the life of Bramwell Tovey: perhaps not as mirabilis as the year when, a student at London's Royal Academy of Music, he dated a flutist named Annie Lennox, but mirabilis enough. 2008 has been the year, nine into his tenure as music director of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, that he was appointed principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from its summer season at the legendary Hollywood Bowl. This summer he also made his debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra and spent several weeks with the New York Philharmonic, as he has often done, conducting concerts in Central Park and elsewhere. His guest-conducting took him to Korea, Norway, and Australia, and in the fall he led a Vancouver Symphony tour to Asia with guest violinist Hilary Hahn, one of the hottest musical properties on the planet. Oh, and it was also the year the VSO, with Tovey conducting the brilliant Canadian violinist James Ehnes, won a Juno-Tovey's second; he took one home in 2003 for his composition Requiem for a Charred Skull-and a Grammy Award.
Never mind, though, that Tovey can stand on a podium and bend a hundred highly trained, opinionated musicians to his will; the guy can also really, really talk. Fluency is the ruling circuit in the motherboard of his being, and this free-flowing rule applies-not surprisingly, given his vocation-as much to music as to language. It's what gives him an edge in a profession that could never be called conventionally overcrowded but that still boasts more qualified candidates than there are podia to contain them.
Q: The audience sees you on the podium and sometimes hears you speak from the stage. So on the one hand, it's perfectly clear what you do. On the other, it's totally mysterious. What are you really doing up there?
A: I'm the person who organizes the orchestra from an artistic point of view. But everything that happens onstage is my responsibility; you could even say it's my fault if things go wrong. I don't necessarily choose all the music-we have a programming committee-but I stand by the choice. I strategize the order of the rehearsal, I have to say definitively if I feel members or sections are ahead or behind the beat, dragging, rushing, if they're flat or sharp. I dictate the tempo with my right hand, and I use the baton because it's more energy-efficient, requires less physical strength. The left hand is used to underline passages, to subdue the orchestra, to cue people, to signal, to emote, to characterize the music we're playing.
