Hands up those of you who attended the recent recital in Dun Laoghaire by a German organist, Wolfgang Zerer, and noticed, along with our critic, that the toccata rhetoric of the outer works by Bruhns and Bach involved the organist in some extremes of flexion in rubato (though the elasticity was not stretched too far), and also spotted the fundamental flaw in the programme, namely the superabundance of the key of E.

Good. Well done, both of you.

Classical music buffs will probably be strongly divided over last week's announcement of Sir Simon Rattle as new chief conductor at the Berlin Philharmonic. The BP, which we all once used to know as Karajan's Band, is of course the most famous and glamorous of all orchestras. To be its chief conductor is to possess the most prestigious and potentially most lucrative job in the classical music world.

Not surprisingly, the build-up to the new appointment has been immense. The media coverage was extensive and colourful. The selection process and the secrecy surrounding it made the election of a Pope look like a netball club subcommittee decision. There was enough faction-fighting to ignite a small world war.

We were supposed to be excited, but in reality it was all rather tedious. The whole business of conducting is wildly overrated, but unfortunately the move to dispense entirely with conductors has never gained momentum.

After all, what does a conductor do? Usually a severe neurotic, he wears a dress suit, waves a baton, sweats a lot and gesticulates even more. He turns his back on the audience and talks up his own performance at the expense of his orchestra. He takes his bow and pockets his substantial fee.

Sometimes you will be told, for example, that a particular conductor "has the knack of clarifying the details of the score without losing sight of the whole." But if you can do that with hurling matches you could probably do it with orchestral scores. It isn't all that complicated, once you realise that violas - all but the most finicky - play in the alto clef, that the English horn dissimulates shamelessly in sounding one fifth lower than it is written, and that the tenor clef is used by bassoons and tenor trombones in those lofty volumes, the high registers, to save the poor copyist having to employ (at top union rates) too many ledger lines.

That's about all there is to it.

But consider the oddities of conductors like Klaus Tennstedt, who was principally associated with the London Philharmonic. Frail in stature, he seemed to literally grow on the podium. He was known as the "demented stork" - his legs as well as his arms became part of his conducting technique. He smoked a cigarette every six minutes (though not when conducting) and when he contracted throat cancer, he gave up smoking - temporarily.

Conductors are usually terrible brats, too. When Tennstedt conducted Don Giovanni at Glyndebourne in 1991, Mozart's bicentenary year, he refused - as did the BP's Furtwangler before him - to conduct the final moralising sextet, and insisted that the opera should end when Giovanni is dragged down to Hell. Sir Peter Hall, then directing operations at Glyndebourne, stood up to this nonsense and Tennstedt went off in a huff, or a minute and a huff, I can't remember which.

But everyone who talks of the Berlin Philharmonic always harks back to the glorious Herbert von Karajan years. Karajan's genius was never questioned at the time (it has been questioned since) but certainly, the rarefied world of great orchestras seems to delight in the creation of monsters, and Karajan was the monster nurtured in Berlin.

"I shall be a dictator", Karajan confidently predicted at the outset of his career, and a dictator is what he was allowed to become. Once the cultural figurehead of Hitler's Germany, and acclaimed in Goebbels's propaganda sheets as das Wunder Karajan, he managed to shroud this dubious background after the war, and for almost 35 years ran the Berlin Philharmonic with a rod of iron.

This autocratic rule was not surprisingly resented by many orchestra members. But, of course, he also made more than 900 records with the orchestra, achieving total sales of well over 100 million.

It hardly needs pointing out then that what is principally involved at this level of the business is money, and plenty of it. The Berlin Philharmonic is massively funded, and its new chief conductor will pick up about half a million pounds for his basic duties. With tours, recordings and so on, this annual figure should easily rise to £1 million.