Cover Wilson Ng conducting at a concert (Photo: courtesy of Dominique Boutin)
Wilson Ng conducting at a concert (Photo: courtesy of Dominique Boutin)
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The arts world can be difficult to navigate. But newbies and those who want to brush up their knowledge, our performing arts series has got you covered with its breakdown of technical terms and concepts. This time, we explain why orchestras have conductors
Legend has it that at the premiere of the famous Ninth Symphony on May 7, 1824, the composer, Beethoven, who had suffered from hearing loss by that time, appeared to conduct the orchestra, but due to his deafness, the players were told to follow the lead of his fellow conductor Michael Umlauf. Beethoven was several bars off from finishing the score when the piece ended.
This scenario, where the conductor was unable to lead the musicians satisfactorily, is somewhat of an exceptional situation. But given that musicians can perform on their own, why exactly are conductors necessary for an orchestra?
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Above Lio Kuokman conducting the Macao Orchestra (Photo: courtesy of Lio Kuokman)
Lio Kuokman conducting the Macao Orchestra (Photo: courtesy of Lio Kuokman)
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“It’s true that it’s okay not to have a conductor. You can have a perfect Symphony No. 7 performed without a conductor,” says Wilson Ng, the principal guest conductor of the Hankyung arte Philharmonic, Seoul. “But a conductor leads the musicians to be in the moment.” This entails counting the music beats, signalling the introduction of different instruments, managing the sound quality and orchestrating the overall mood of the performance.
As Ng says, “You need somebody to see the whole structure of the piece: is the orchestra too loud or too aggressive from the beginning? Are we too excited? How can we pace the storytelling through the music?”
Off stage, most of a conductor’s time is taken up by research and rehearsals. Lio Kuokman, the resident conductor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and a professional pianist and violinist, compares his job to that of a film director. “A director doesn’t have to act, but he knows all the lines; he knows how to make the actors perform better. Similarly, I do not necessarily play [the violin or piano] better than an orchestra’s musician. My job, instead, is to decode what the composer said and the meaning of the piece.”
Above Wilson Ng (Photo: courtesy of Wilson Ng)
Wilson Ng (Photo: courtesy of Wilson Ng)
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Both Lio and Ng, who have international music training, emphasise the importance of understanding how each of the instruments of an orchestra work.
“From my training, research and understanding of the composer’s vision, I have an imagination of what the piece sounds like, and I compare this with the actual sounds I hear at rehearsals. I then [advise] and inspire the musician to achieve something more,” Lio says.
That is particularly useful when an orchestra has anywhere from 80 to more than 100 musicians. “If each of them raises a question or suggestion, it will take weeks to come up with an artistic decision,” he continues. “So the conductor makes the decision.”
That is not to say the conductor is always right. “Some musicians I [have] worked with have played under Igor Stravinsky himself, and they would tell you when the piece was not supposed to be played this way,” he says. “Being a conductor doesn’t make you more important than any musician. We’re all equal and we’re all trying to find out what the composers wanted [from their piece].”
Then there’s administration work: finding a soloist for the orchestra, auditioning musicians, designing performance programmes, planning tours, finding sponsors and, as Ng puts it, “convincing politicians and billionaires that music should exist.”
“I think a conductor [plays the part of a leader] and there’s always a leader in an orchestra.”
Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
