Others had already made a breach. Simon Rattle, working in glamour-free Birmingham for 18 years, scorned the three-continent career. Quiet Finns, led by Esa-Pekka Salonen, offered Baltic consensus as an alternative to rostrum rants. Post-Soviets like Semyon Bychkov and Jurowski rejected monolithic authority. When a collapsing record industry threw out famous maestros like used tissues — four in one morning at Decca in 1997 — the former lion kings were left looking like mangy cats.
Yet, for all the modifications, willing and enforced, the old authoritarian model proved resilient. Rattle, promoted to the Berlin Philharmonic, now plays Salzburg and Baden-Baden festivals off against each other in true Karajan style. The electrifying Valery Gergiev adopts an absolutism that he says is necessitated by Russian chaos. Daniel Barenboim is a distinctly old-fashioned music director at the state opera in Berlin, though not quite as pre-war as Christian Thielemann at Dresden.
Riccardo Muti, in a memoir, hankers for the hard-hat maestros of his youth. Lorin Maazel, 81, has just landed a new job in Munich. A forthcoming Faber survey by Tom Service takes an altogether softer and more admiring view of conductors than I did in The Maestro Myth. One can almost hear the clock turning back.
Until this past summer, that is, when three events changed the balance of power, perhaps for good. In Brazil, a bumptious conductor called Roberto Minczuk ordered his players to reaudition for their jobs, or face the sack. The musicians went on Facebook and shared details of their plight. Major soloists boycotted Rio and the maestro was demoted. Social media had triumphed over rampant ego.
In Russia, the conductor Mark Gorenstein was caught on a live webcast abusing a contestant in the Tchaikovsky competition. Within hours, the clip was on YouTube. Gorenstein's musicians who had long complained of his high-handedness demanded his removal. When the ministry refused, they turned up at rehearsal and sat four hours without playing-posting the confrontation Rio-style on YouTube. Within days, Gorenstein was gone. Musicians of the world had been empowered by mod comms.
