“You were born to conduct!”

“It’s too late now,” I laughed, “to make it my career.” I was having my first conducting lesson with Maestro Maxim Eshkenazy at the Luzerne Music Center. The Center, a music camp for gifted students ages 9-18, is ten minutes from the front door of my cabin in the Adirondacks where I spend my summers. In 2015 at the Center’s annual fundraising auction, a new item caught my eye: Special Conducting Experience with the Student Orchestra for the following summer. Impulsively I bid on it. So did another woman. We kept upping the bid to the delight of the guests, providing the only lively auction action that night. I had no idea what her limits were. I skipped a couple of incremental rungs and grasped the prize. It was mine. Now what?

I was seventy eight years old and though I had studied a variety of instruments beginning with the childhood basic: the piano, followed by the guitar, added the harmonica, also the recorder, dropped the harmonica and eventually the recorder, gave up the guitar and began the mountain dulcimer, still keeping in touch with the piano and always, the instrument no one can touch with their fingers, the voice, I was and remain an enthusiastic amateur. I had not yet conducted an orchestra; that was what appealed to me so strongly.

Maestro Ashkenazy gave me a crash course in the fundamentals so that I would look like I knew what I was doing when I conducted the Luzerne Music Center’s Symphony Orchestra in a one time performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Dance of the Tumblers from his opera The Snow Maiden, as the first ever recipient of the LMC Gala Conducting Experience Award. He lent me his baton and demonstrated how to use it as a right handed person: Raise it to shoulder height at the top of an imaginary line parallel to your right side and bring the baton straight down to emphasize the strong beats, move it to the right and back again approximately at your waist level, returning the baton up to your shoulder height. “There are two critical moments in conducting: the beginning and the conclusion. Make sure you have everyone’s attention before you begin and before you conclude. Scan every single musician with your eyes. You have to know that they are all waiting your signal. As for everything in between -you are merely“eye candy” for the audience. You don’t have to worry about making any fatal mistakes with this orchestra! They know this piece by heart.”

I had a week to prepare. I printed out an enlarged copy of the score, used colored pens to highlight each section of the orchestra -the strings, woodwinds, brasswinds, percussion- and listened to a recording of the Dance again and again while studying the score. Maestro Eshkenazy had a gig of his own the weekend of my debut, so I continued my studies under the baton of the warm and welcoming conductor Stephen Czarkowski. The orchestra and I had a chance to rehearse the entire piece from the moment I would be called up to the stage, to the moment I would ask the students to take their bows. The actual experience later that afternoon was thrilling. For three minutes I “played” the orchestra as though it was one enormous instrument capable of a variety of sounds. It required my complete attention, but by this time, knowing the piece so well, I could let the characteristic sounds from one section of the orchestra guide me to concentrate on inviting another section in. I especially enjoyed using my left hand and arm, indeed my entire body to indicate dynamics of emphasis and volume. When the opportunity was offered again that evening at the Gala auction, it was difficult to restrain myself and let someone else win it. I restrained myself for two more years. In the summer of 2019 I bid again but Covid closed the camp for two years. This summer, The Luzerne Symphony Orchestra , under the baton of Aaron King Vaughn, performed for an appreciative audience on August 5. I was given “one of the most celebrated compositions in the history of Western Civilization,” the Radetsky March by Johann Strauss Sr., to conduct. It’s one of those pieces whose name you might not know which are immediately recognized as familiar. This festive march is traditionally played as an encore every New Year’s Eve by the Viennese Symphony Orchestra, with the audience clapping along on the beat, a custom that dates back to when it was first played for the Austrian officers in honor of Field Marshal Radetsky von Radetz’s military triumph over an Italian attempt to separate from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in August of 1848. The March is not as inherently charming as the Dance, but it was fun, and so simple that I never needed to study a score – I just needed to find it youtube and listen to it several times, nor did I even need to use a baton.

I haven’t decided yet how many years I’ll wait until I raise my hand again to bid on the privilege and pleasure of conducting again.