Benjamin Zander came early to music and late to conducting. And he established his reputation as a conductor in a most unusual way. The Boston Philharmonic, which he has conducted since its foundation in 1979, is a semi-professional group, made up of volunteers, students and professionals, not exactly a conventional launching-pad for an international conducting career.
And, as if that's already not exceptional enough, he managed to win critical accolades for recordings with the Boston Philharmonic, including a performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, taped in concert in 1990.
Zander's father, a lawyer by profession, seems to have lived and breathed music. As a youngster, he played under the legendary Arthur Nikisch, the first man to record a complete symphony, Beethoven's Fifth, with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1913. He also played piano duets with Peter Weingartner (son of the conductor Felix, the first man to record all nine Beethoven symphonies), and he composed and played the viola, too. "My earliest experiences of music were from him," says the younger Zander. "He played as if he was just suffused with joy. He would play at the piano and it looked like somebody in ecstasy. You know that scene from When Harry Met Sally? I said to myself: 'Whatever he's having, I want that'."
And have it he did.
Although he has spent most of his adult life in Boston, he was born in England, where he counted Benjamin Britten and Imogen Holst among his early influences. But the figure who marked him most profoundly was the Spanish cellist, Gaspar Cassadó, who mesmerised him with his playing and who became his teacher for five years.
"I left school at 15, and at that point I was no longer a normal person," Zander says. "I lived in Italy, I lived in Germany, I travelled the world as his apprentice, carrying his cello and doing everything for him that he could possibly need. He taught me for free for five years, in that old apprentice/master way, where he was responsible for everything."
And now, conducting career notwithstanding, it's primarily as a teacher that Zander views himself. He's been on the staff of the New England Conservatory for more than 30 years. From his earliest youth, he came to understand that "music is a very live, expressive art, which enhances our life in a real way. It's not just pleasant. It's not just entertaining. It's not just nice. It really is one of the things which changes our view of who we are as human beings."
He seems to feel that his allotted task is to communicate this outlook to students, players and audiences.
There is, of course, a gap to be explained, between the training as a cellist and the achievements as a conductor. The cello-playing came to an abrupt end.
"I didn't continue with my life as a cellist, because I couldn't produce calluses," he says. "Instead of producing calluses, I produced blood when I played the cello. I played the Haydn concerto with orchestra, with band-aids on every finger. It was just impossible."
It was, he says, a real crisis, and he assumed he would have to follow an alternative career. At the age of 21 he began studying for a degree in English at London University. He speaks mildly about what would for many people have been a major life catastrophe.
"I wouldn't say I was devastated. I was confused. I had a lot of interests. Literature was fascinating to me, and I did very well," he explains. He won a Harkness Fellowship, and went to Harvard to study poetry analysis. "There was a course I was very interested in, which took poems and studied them in great detail. I was very fascinated by whether one could do that with music."
He got back into music "by the back door", teaching cello and, by chance, getting the opportunity to conduct, something for which his mother had divined his talent before he did.
Cellists, of course, are among the most physically demonstrative of performers, and Zander was, as he puts it, "very expressive as a cellist and a chamber music coach. I was very physical with my hands and expressive with my face and singing". At an interview for a post coaching cello and chamber music on a summer course, he also ended up with the conducting brief by asserting that he had all the necessary experience.
At this point, he admits, he had never conducted a note. "But, in a sense, I was right. I was very experienced. Coaching a Brahms piano quartet and coaching the Webern Symphony is no different."
This brings him around to what he sees as one of his distinguishing characteristics as a conductor. "One of the things I bring to an orchestra is the notion that an orchestra is a large chamber music group.
"I assume that a) the musicians will want, and b) they will be able to produce, timings and rubati that are natural for chamber music but are almost unheard of for orchestra players. It's very hard to do it."
He recalls a passage from his recording, with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, of Mahler's Fifth Symphony that is so "spectacularly free" he still wonders "how on earth did we do that?" The answer, he says, "is that I've now got the Philharmonia so that they say: 'Oh, I remember. This is the person who invites us to play the way we play when we play Brahms trios.'
"My assumption is, and my gift, if you like, to the players is: 'I know you're great musicians. I know you can play freely and that you want to play freely, because that's the way you play when you are at home, playing chamber music. Why not let's do it now?'
"And then, of course, the problem comes that it may not be quite together. When you invite people to play freely they don't necessarily play freely all together, because they don't necessarily feel it quite in the same way. And so there's a period of either bewilderment, or confusion, or even irritation, in which new orchestras that I come in contact with don't quite understand what I'm doing, and get worried. With my own orchestra, now, they're so used to it, they do these amazing timings without eventhinking any more.
"Musicians tend to do better," he coninues, "when, like dogs and children, they're well treated. Forgive me, the analogy is inappropriate. But take the Arab/Israeli conflict. If you tie a dog up and don't feed it, and don't give it water, and kick it every time you pass by, there's a good chance that the next time you pass by, it will bite you, particularly if it's in such a survival mode that it doesn't see any hope for itself. It might as well just lash out, because what difference does it make? People shouldn't be surprised that the Palestinians are blowing themselves up in supermarkets. It's exactly correlative behaviour to the way they've been treated.
"I, very early on, realised that, just like a parent or a political leader or a teacher or any other kind of leader, a conductor tends to get better results when he treats the players as grown-ups, as equals, as colleagues. My job as a conductor is as a conduit - that's where the word for conductor comes from."
TO MAKE his points about the freedoms he's trying to encourage, he sings, clicks his fingers, waves his arms, hauls the full score of Mahler's Fifth Symphony out of his bag and details passage after passage where the literal notation and the conventional musical response to that notation have to be unwound and rewound in ways that notation hasn't really yet developed to accommodate.
Of course, you could view all of this as just another way for the conductor to exert his power. "Am I manipulating them and pushing them around? No. I keep saying to them: 'Don't follow me. Feel the freedom of the music. That's the essence of what I'm saying. Feel the freedom, it's in there.' "
What he's defining is the role of a conductor who'snot there to have his own way, but to empower the musicians to have it their way, within a collective understanding of the parameters presented by the music itself.
It sounds hugely idealistic, an unravelling of current practices to return to a freedom that's not often to be found in orchestral playing or recordings any more. He associates the freedoms of his own music-making with the generation of conductors that was active in the first half of the 20th century. He links the demise of their tradition to "guest conductors, airplanes, and records" - conductors spend too little time with their own orchestras, they travel too much and give concerts on too little rehearsal, while recordings have increased the demand for technical perfection in performance. Key figures he identifies in the turnaround are two men who worked in the US in mid-century, Toscanini and Szell.
The teacher in Zander is always present when he talks about music, and manages to come to the fore, too, in his CDs. Most of his recent Telarc recordings of symphonies by Mahler and Beethoven come with bonus discs on which he discusses issues surrounding the performance of the works.
Talking, of course, is something Zander is famous for, too. He's become a celebrated management guru, a development which stemmed from an invitation to talk about music to an organisation of US company presidents. He was too busy to comply, but said they would be welcome to come to one of his rehearsals. One hundred and eighty presidents then showed up to sit among the players of the Boston Philharmonic as he prepared The Rite of Spring. One of the visitors wrote a letter saying, "I've done sky-diving, I've done deep-sea fishing", and went on to list all the other things he'd done, before concluding: "Nothing I've done can compare to sitting in the viola section during that rehearsal."
Invitations to talk to individual companies followed, and while he is in Ireland, he will talk to the Irish Management Institute.
"You know, why is very interesting, and actually quite moving," Zander says. "Because, for years and years, if somebody wanted a coach, they brought in a soldier or a sportsman, somebody who'd had success winning in a competition.
"Now, the whole world has shifted. The world is no longer about competition, or not primarily. Now, everybody's connected. A bad year in Japan affects us all. The symphony as a model becomes a much more powerful metaphor than the old, bash-the-enemy-up kind of thing. And so all that motivational stuff, which gets you all excited, actually is useless. What I'm doing is shifting people's thinking from the ground up.
"The CEO is no longer the dominator. He's the empowerer. He's the person whose job is to awaken possibility in other people. When they are giving away their power as I'm suggesting, they are infinitely more empowered, just as I am as a conductor."
•Benjamin Zander conducts the National Symphony Orchestra in Strauss's Emperor Waltz and Mahler's Fifth Symphony at the National Concert Hall on Friday at 8 p.m. He will give a pre- concert talk at 6.45 p.m. To book, tel: 01-4170000 or visit www.nch.ie
