What does a conductor really do? Unveiling the mystique behind the baton

San Francisco Chronicle​

29-05-2025

If you go to an orchestra concert, it's pretty easy to figure out what most of the people onstage are contributing to the overall experience. The violinists and cellists move their bows back and forth across the strings, providing lush, sweeping carpets of sound. The flutists tootle sweetly and the percussionist gives an occasional thwack on the big bass drum.
Meanwhile, everyone's attention is focused on the man or woman standing on the podium, waving a baton and contributing… what, exactly?
It's a legitimate question. Classical music devotees and concert hall neophytes alike tend to take it for granted that it's the conductor, more than anyone, who lends each orchestral performance its distinctive character. The conductor has become practically a cultural archetype, the object of endless fascination and the subject of breathless biographies and Hollywood films. Recent examples include Bradley Cooper's Leonard Bernstein biopic ' Maestro ' (2023) and the Oscar-nominated ' Tár ' (2022), starring Cate Blanchett.
So when the music sizzles and soars, the conductor gets the credit. When it bogs down, or fails to cohere into a meaningful whole, the conductor takes the blame.
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Esa-Pekka Salonen's Final Concerts
Esa-Pekka Salonen & Hilary Hahn: San Francisco Symphony. 2 p.m. Thursday, May 29; 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 30; 2 p.m. Sunday, June 1. $49-$350.
Salonen Conducts Sibelius 7: San Francisco Symphony. 7:30 p.m. June 6-7; 2 p.m. June 8. $49-$179.
Salonen Conducts Mahler 2: San Francisco Symphony. 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, June 12-14. $145-$399.
All shows are at Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-864-6000. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit www.sfsymphony.org.
But what are they actually doing up there? Why is the conductor so important to a performance, and what are the skills that make one conductor's work audibly better than another's?
These questions are always relevant, but they've become even more urgent as Bay Area audiences prepare for the departure of San Francisco Symphony Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen after his final performance on June 14. (The search for Salonen's replacement is currently under way, according to Symphony spokesperson Taryn Lott. But the process can take several years, she added, and 'like most hiring practices, much of the process will not take place publicly to protect the privacy of those involved.')
To understand what makes a conductor's contributions to any individual performance distinctive — as well as the importance of a music director's ongoing presence in the life of an orchestra — is to begin to grasp the magnitude of the impending loss.
'A music director, because they work with an orchestra for 16 or 18 weeks out of the year, has a real impact on that orchestra's sound,' said John Mangum, who served as the Symphony's artistic administrator in 2011-14 before taking on the top executive posts at the Houston Symphony and, since last year, the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
'They don't just conduct great concerts. They take the lead in shaping the orchestra's sound, and their interests define the organization's artistic profile.'
But even within the more limited scope of a one-week guest engagement or a single concert, a conductor wields enormous influence over the musical outcome.
Nicole Paiement, artistic and general director of San Francisco's Opera Parallèle, likens a conductor to the architect of a musical performance, and the individual musicians to the carpenters, masons and electricians responsible for their particular tasks.
'Members of an orchestra are great musicians, and they know how to play their parts better than the conductor does,' Paiement said. 'But what they don't have is the whole picture of the piece. As the conductor, you are the only one who has an image in your mind of how everything fits together. It's up to you to keep everyone together in a single vision.'
Shepherding some 100 skilled artists through a performance that is simultaneously precise and expressively free, with a coherent interpretive point of view that makes an audience hear something new and lively in what is often familiar repertoire, can seem like an implausibly complicated feat.
It requires an ability to track large numbers of simultaneous musical strands in real time. It calls for interpersonal gifts that can inspire musicians to do their best in the service of the conductor's vision. (Older generations of conductors leaned more heavily on tyrannical browbeating — a technique that, like spanking children, has happily gone out of fashion.)
It also entails cultivating and mastering an enormous gestural language, an array of physical and facial cues that allow conductors to communicate wordlessly but unambiguously with members of the orchestra.
A lot of that multitasking can be invisible to an audience, because most of the work of conducting takes place in rehearsal. That's where interpretive priorities are set, difficult transitions are ironed out and agreements are worked out in advance.
'What the audience sees at a performance is really the final touches of what a conductor does,' says Patti Niemi, the acting principal percussionist of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra. 'By then, they're mostly a traffic cop. Their primary purpose is everything they do up to that point.'
Historically speaking, conductors weren't always part of the orchestral tradition. Until about 1820, an orchestra's principal requirement was someone to beat time, and that task could be entrusted to a member of the orchestra — typically the concertmaster (the leader of the first violin section) or someone at the harpsichord or piano.
Even today, there are ensembles such as San Francisco's New Century Chamber Orchestra that perform without a conductor. Other groups could do it if they had to.
'Truth be told, any orchestra could probably play Beethoven's Fifth without a conductor,' said violinist René Mandel, who plays frequently with the San Francisco Symphony and is the former executive director of the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. 'You could have the concertmaster leading off, and the orchestra could do it on their own with the concertmaster guiding them through certain spots.
But, he added, 'that doesn't mean you don't need a conductor.'
The importance of the conductor grew steadily throughout the 19th century, as orchestras became larger and as the music written for them became more complex. At the same time, the aesthetics of the Romantic era contributed to a regard for the conductor as an exalted poetic figure, second only to the actual composer.
The aura surrounding a conductor still lingers, because there does seem to be something almost other-worldly about what they do. Talk to any musician about the conductor's role, and you can be sure that a vein of vague magical thinking will surface before the conversation is more than a few minutes old.
'For me, the best conductors have an intangible quality to what they do,' said Mangum. 'It's hard to pin down, but you know it as soon as you hear it. They have a vision in mind of what they want to achieve musically, and they can convey that to the orchestra physically or verbally or both.'
A conductor such as the late Bernard Haitink, according to Edwin Outwater, 'can create so much beauty just in the way they draw sound from an orchestra.'
'It's the way he moved,' continued Outwater, who heads the conducting program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, 'and the way he elicited the music physically and with his eyes and face. A conductor connects a group of people and gets them on the same page so they can sound beautiful and expressive.'
Mystical woo-woo aside, though, the list of hard practicalities a conductor is responsible for is strikingly long. The most basic task is simply keeping the beat so that every member of the orchestra knows where they are at any given moment.
As with nearly every aspect of the craft, there are countless ways to do this, and each conductor finds a personal technique. Most use a baton so as to show a downbeat as crisply and precisely as possible; others prefer to use just their hands.
Even the simple act of beating time contains multitudes from an interpretive standpoint. A sharp downward chop of the baton, for example, prompts the orchestra to play a phrase in a crisply articulated fashion, while a fluid side-to-side motion elicits something gentler and more mellifluous.
The conductor also has to keep tabs on which musicians have been silent for a while, and let them know when it's time for them to resume playing.
'You don't want to cue the violins while they have the big melody,' explains Paiement. 'That's annoying to the violinists. But an oboist who hasn't played for 52 bars and suddenly enters? To acknowledge that entrance and say, 'Here we go, this is where you come in' — that's totally important.'
Beyond these practical nuts and bolts lies a more elusive set of skills: the art of conveying mood, phrasing and articulation to the orchestra through silent communication. (If there's one thing conductors and orchestra musicians agree on, it's that the less a conductor talks, the better.)
During a lesson at the Conservatory last spring, Outwater coached Chih-Yao Chang, a Taiwanese graduate student in the conducting program, through a tricky section of Stravinsky's ballet 'Petrushka,' while pianist Peter Grünberg served as a stand-in for the orchestra.
The lesson involved an occasional correction of rhythm or timing, but most of it was devoted to helping Chang get the right response from a hypothetical orchestra. In the opening measures, which depict a country fair, Outwater demonstrated how he would conduct the passage, then prompted Chang for a description.
'What changed about the gesture?' he asked. 'What did I do differently?'
'It's lighter,' Chang said.
'Lighter, yeah, and bigger. More open. The music is energetic, but it has to have some buoyancy too,' Outwater added.
Later, he urged Chang to keep in mind that 'Petrushka' is a ballet.
'The next step is not to conduct but to dance with the orchestra,' Outwater noted. 'Sometimes you direct the orchestra if you want to bring them through a phrase, but for a lot of this rhythmic music you have to create a feeling of dancing together.'
Chang, who started out as a flutist, switched to conducting in the wake of a lung injury. The difference between the two pursuits, he said, is striking.
'As a flutist, you only need to care about yourself and your score. But as a conductor, you're working with 60 or 70 people who all have different characters and different abilities,' Chang observed. 'How to combine everybody is very interesting to me.'
Ultimately, the conductor's job is to fuse all those disparate musical sensibilities into a single interpretive voice. Just as a violinist or a bassoonist makes expressive choices in approaching a single phrase, the conductor uses the orchestra to shape an entire work.
'Fundamentally, a conductor's purpose is to use us as their instrument,' says the Opera Orchestra's Niemi. 'They make all the fundamental choices about a piece of music.'
And the range of choices is practically infinite, as Outwater likes to demonstrate by invoking the opening line of Hamlet's soliloquy.
''To be or not to be' — those are six words on the page, but there are a thousand ways to say it,' he points out. 'Laurence Olivier says it one way, Kenneth Branagh says it another way.
'The same thing is true of the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth. There are four notes, but there are a million ways to do them that have multiple possibilities and meanings.'