It is one of the indelible star-is-born moments in music history: Leonard Bernstein, the 25-year-old assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, steps in for an ailing maestro and leads the orchestra in a concert broadcast live on the radio, which causes a sensation .
“It’s a good American success story,” the New York Times wrote in an editorial following a front-page review of the 1943 coup. “The warm, friendly triumph filled Carnegie Hall and spread over the airwaves.”
Fifteen years later, Bernstein was music director of the Philharmonic. And the dream of moving from assistant to a large American orchestra to its leadership – like climbing a career ladder – was cemented in the popular imagination.
There are still assistant conductors, bright, talented 20- and 30-year-olds who are hired by orchestras for a few years. In fact, there are more of them than ever, and they carry a variety of titles: Assistant, Associate, Fellow, Resident. Almost every large orchestra has at least one, and they still perform the traditional tasks of Bernstein’s day: sitting in the concert hall at rehearsals, checking balance sheets and writing down scores; Conducting groups of musicians off-stage for certain pieces; and of course to be ready to take the podium in an emergency. But it’s rare for them to move up to the top jobs.
And that can be a missed opportunity. When Marin Alsop leaves the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra this summer, it will leave the top flight of American ensembles as they were before they took office in 2007: without a single female music director. This group had only one black music director and only a handful of the leaders were Latino or Asian.
“It has long been a paternalistic industry to some extent,” said Kim Noltemy, executive director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, in an interview. “A lot has changed in the last 20 years, but there are delays for the top management level, be it management or conductors.”
It looks different, however, if you look at the country’s assistants, a far more diverse group in which colored women and musicians have been successful in recent years.
Now is the chance that these assistant conductors will become more than just another ear in a darkened auditorium. They offer the opportunity to accelerate greater diversity in institutions that have developed slowly over time. The question now is how quickly they will rise to the top ranks – and whether, when the big orchestras are looking for music directors in the coming years, they will be looking at the audience right under their noses.
“It’s great to have a BIPOC assistant conductor,” said Jonathan Rush, the Baltimore assistant conductor who is Black, referring to the acronym for Black, Indigenous and People of Color. “To have that is great. But there still aren’t many opportunities for you to be the person a younger musician can look up to. Yes, I get educational concerts, they’re great, but we would have a bigger impact if we were music directors. “
As community engagement and public relations have expanded nationwide and become increasingly important to leading orchestras, many assistants have added these activities to their portfolios as well. And during the coronavirus pandemic, when many artists were grounded abroad, some assistants took on new meanings. Vinay Parameswaran, the Cleveland Orchestra’s assistant conductor who had spent a few years mostly doing family concerts and leading the ensemble’s youth orchestra, unexpectedly ran several large programs on the Cleveland subscription streaming platform.
The differences between the assistant ranks of the 25 best American orchestras and the music directors of these orchestras can hardly be overestimated. The Dallas Symphony, for example, has had three assistants as of 2013, all women; one of them, Karina Canellakis, is now chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic. The two conducting apprentices of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra have been women since 2015. The Minnesota Orchestra’s assistants during this period were Roderick Cox, one of the few black conductors to perform with leading orchestras and major opera houses, and Akiko Fujimoto, who became music director of the small Mid-Texas Symphony in 2019.
Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, who was a conducting fellow and then assistant conductor at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has become a star, directed the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in England and made recordings for Deutsche Grammophon. Gemma New, resident conductor of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra until last year, is now Principal Guest Conductor in Dallas and conducted the New York Philharmonic’s Memorial Day concert at St. John the Divine Cathedral.
But there are still ubiquitous, sometimes damaging assumptions about how a music director should look and act – who can be with donors, who can help sell tickets. And apart from Bernstein’s model, there is no clear pipeline from assistant to director positions with top American orchestras, as is the case with many corporations.
Of the current top level music directors, only a handful started out as assistants to the type of orchestra they lead today. (And as a sign of how isolated this world is, two of these handfuls, Michael Stern, now in Kansas City, and Ken-David Masur, in Milwaukee, are the sons of musical royalty, the violinist Isaac Stern and the conductor Kurt Masuren. )
Andrés Orozco-Estrada, now music director of the Houston Symphony, is the rare conductor who lives the Bernstein dream, but he didn’t do it in the USA: he was an assistant at the Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna in the early 2000s, a few years later to the chief conductor. (European orchestras have followed the American ones in the codification of assistance programs; the traditional conducting career in Europe, especially in German-speaking countries, leads through opera houses, not symphonies.)
The experiential paradox is part of the problem. Top orchestras require their conductors to be mature, especially when performing on prestigious subscription series. But if you haven’t already had this experience, it’s hard to get.
“There are some people who are basically professional assistants or just move from assistant to assistant,” said Stephanie Childress, the current assistant to the St. Louis Symphony, suggesting the feeling that some talented artists are just in those ranks cycle without climbing further.
Orchestra officials, however, insist that things change, accelerated by the shock of the pandemic and calls for more racial and ethnic diversity over the past year.
“As it always has been, everything is being rethought,” said Noltemy, adding that resistance from players and listeners has subsided. “’The orchestra won’t accept it; the audience won’t accept it ‘- that has been completely deconstructed. “
There are ways to increase the chances that today’s assistants will become tomorrow’s music directors. Orchestras could deepen their investment in their assistant programs and add positions to expand the pool of talent who gain experience and become known. There should be a stronger obligation to provide slots for subscription programs to assistants under their contracts; This is a Covid imperative that could outlast the pandemic fruitfully.
Ensembles should look to assistants from other organizations when hiring concerts. It happens sometimes: Yue Bao, currently conductor of the Houston Symphony and a major streaming role for that orchestra last year, will debut with the Chicago Symphony at the Ravinia Festival this summer.
Matías Tarnopolsky, executive director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, said he wanted some sort of consortium program that could rotate assistants between multiple top institutions to give them a broader experience. “Could a conducting scholarship be a multi-ensemble,” said Tarnopolsky, “either within the USA or around the world, combining symphony and ensemble for new music? Then you really expand your learning. “
And when a young conductor is successful, let it snow. In Baltimore, just before the pandemic, Rush performed as part of the orchestra’s Symphony in the City series and was then asked to attend his next assistant conductor audition, slated for June 2020.
That audition was canceled as the virus spread, but Rush received another call in July. “Hey, listen,” he recalled the orchestra, “the musicians rave about your work again and again in February, and we would like to invite you to become assistant conductor for the 2020/21 season.”
“It was definitely different,” Rush added as he assisted during the pandemic, which included working with the orchestra’s streaming programs on a regular basis. “But I wouldn’t have got that much podium time. I was allowed to conduct the orchestra every week. ”
Ensembles should have a plan for continuing relationships with their assistants as these young conductors move on. Marie-Hélène Bernard, the executive director of the St. Louis Symphony, said the organization has committed to inviting Gemma New as a guest conductor each season after her residency contract expires.
“For them we have a trusting relationship,” said Bernard. “She can leave her level of comfort and take musical risks that she might not take with other orchestras that she has not yet attended. Maintaining is not just for the time that she is here with us. “
This is the work that can help transform the encouragingly diverse landscape of assistant conductors into the future of the best music directors in the country. “Getting a replacement for Marin isn’t even a turning point,” said Noltemy, referring to Alsop’s departure from Baltimore. “The turning point would be a significant number of women in positions in the top orchestras in the United States”
But the field won’t get there without taking risks. Ruth Reinhardt had just started as an assistant in Dallas in 2016 when she was recruited into a subscription program to replace a seasoned conductor who had suffered a stroke. Dallas Morning News reviewer Scott Cantrell raved, “Few artistic experiences are as exciting as a brilliant debut by a young musician.”
It worked for amber; We’ll see if it works for this new generation. “When I started conducting about 15 years ago,” said Reinhardt, “people frankly said that you couldn’t do that as a woman. And things are changing. The jobs are more available. Hopefully we will move up as we age. “
