Conductor's Hands

Emanuel Balaban was teaching conducting at Julliard and privately when I first met him in 1970.  At that point in his life he was a bit frail but simply due to age and what he often referred to as "youthful habits".  I was fresh from the mid-west where it seemed we spent all our lives outdoors and New Yorkers were something of a pale and fragile lot to us anyway - as erroneous as a conclusion as I could draw.

Each private lesson started with sol feggio (do re mi) and I invite you  all to sing Three Blind Mice with no words but Mi-Re-Do, Mi-Re-Do, Sol Fa Mi etc. The book we all used, and I still have it, was Dannhauser's Solfegge des Solfegges or something like that and it got hard pretty fast.  Mr. Balaban (never once did I presume to ever call him Emanuel and it was almost always Maestro if we were in a group) assigned me the Rachmaninoff  "Vocalise" and demanded I singing it with an operatic voice to "overcome my shyness" so I worked for a while on it - I think until he could stand no more.  I came to a lesson shortly afterward and he brought me into his front room with the piano and he had a manuscript on the music stand entitled "Vocalise" and I thought "Oh Brother..more torture" and he said "No no...its mine ... would you like to hear it"? And he played for me and it was very nice, written out in a somewhat scrawly hand but easily read and not precise like I imagined it would be.

The work dated from the 20s or so, perhaps before, and out came this set of stories about a Russian Countess, Ballet in France and Monte Carlo, the War Years, Rio...simply all kinds of things exotic to a kid from Michigan.  What he was trying to tell me, aside from a bit of memory lane, was that conductor's not only have a huge skill set - the basis of going to lessons - but they actually had to learn to act like conductors act. 

He had met and known Stravinsky while in France in the first decades of the century and who died early April of 1971 - and we had planned to go the a NY Philharmonic concert after a lesson and it was shortly following the day Stravinsky died.  He got back into his story mode prior to the concert. (If you are bored, just, well, be bored or move on).  He asked me what I looked for at a concert - I told him I, like a lot of students, would hang out at intermission outside concert halls and bum second half tickets from those who were leaving - and it was ideal to sit close to the stage but on the far right or left so we could watch the conductors and therefore and I replied "conductor's hands". I was fascinated by how hands actually talked to the orchestra.  Balaban was both a conductor and a pianist and his hands honestly fascinated me as they were thin and fragile looking - very pale and looked not at all strong and somewhat swollen like most pianists (you try banging your fingers on a block of wood 8 hours a day and report back).

He recounted that Stokowski, the great conductor, realized that his hands held a fascination to an audience and used to put talcum powder on his hands before he went on stage and then had special lights rigged to illuminate the space right in front of him so that his hands would seemingly glisten when viewed by the audience.  Some conductors didn't use a baton so that their hands could be "freer".  In truth, what these conductor's were doing was "acting like conductors" quite apart from the skill set.  They knew that the audience or for that matter "working the room" at a reception demanded some of this showmanship, voice inflection, not being at all shy, delicate graceful hands, etc. and that was something of the European way.

We went to the concert and George Szell was conducting and in memoriam to Stravinsky, he performed a Stokowski transcription of some Bach Prelude and Fugue set for orchestra and Stokowski, in the audience, was acknowledged and stood up and he clasped his hands above his head in applause to the orchestra and his hands - clear as day - glistened with talcum powder.

Balaban leaned over and said "See"?  And as you can see from the Picasso portrait of Stravinsky in about 1920, when Balaban knew him, he had hands too.