Techniques for training and conducting a youth or college orchestra are covered in Christopher Adey’s excellent book Orchestral Performance.6 Some of the interviewees already quoted in Part Two of this book contribute further considerations.

Colleges and conservatoires occasionally invite a distinguished professional conductor to rehearse and conduct a concert with the students. Some achieve excellent performances, providing a valuable and memorable experience for the young performers. Others fail to engage with an orchestra, resulting in a tense and inadequate performance. From observations, my own conclusion is that a lack of teaching experience usually accounts for this failure, no matter how accomplished the conductor might be. Expectations from a professional orchestra are based on the expertise and experience of the orchestral musicians, plus the assumption that they can tackle anything put in front of them. If a conductor carries this assumption in rehearsing with the comparatively inexperienced musicians in a college, frustration will be mutual for the students and the conductor. Rehearsals with students of any standard should be based on teaching them, whether on technical issues or artistic perception. In conducting complex contemporary orchestral works with students I have always found them receptive to instruction and guidance if patience, determination and a little humour are the supportive ingredients. No matter how unsatisfactory the efforts of individual students might be, they must never be humiliated in the presence of the orchestra. This can be psychologically damaging as well as unfair and unproductive.

While these comments might seem unnecessary observations which can be taken for granted, it is surprising how often the fallibility of human nature makes us overlook such issues. I consider them to be strict rules in a conductor’s responsibilities. Leon Botstein brings the student conductor into these issues with observations relating to college and university courses. In judging a student performance he feels that ‘too much emphasis can be placed on what a conductor looks like and not enough on what the result sounds like.’ While this is a generalisation, he has witnessed this as an adjudicator in conducting competitions where ‘The criteria are based on appearance and manner rather than artistry.’