Keith Bruce
The widow of Sir Charles Mackerras, the great Australian conductor emeritus of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, died shortly before Christmas. Lady Judy ruled the maestro carefully, as we discovered when he carefully shielded himself from her gaze to enjoy a pre-lunch glass of champagne on the occasion when we awarded him a Herald Archangel award. So it is safe to assume that she may have taken a dim view of the fact that while they both graced our ceremony with their presence, when we honoured conductor Claudio Abbado in the same way, I had to go to his rehearsal to deliver it. That task did mean that I can boast of having received a round of applause from the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester.
Sir Charles died in the summer of 2010 and last year we lost Abbado, man who had enjoyed a quite remarkable last few years of work after earlier serious illness. 2014 also saw the passing of Lorin Maazel, Franz Bruggen and Christopher Hogwood, so the year put a serious dent in the persuasive theory that waving your arms about on a podium (good for the heart allegedly) was a passport to longevity, although there are still a good few active veteran conductors out there. A survey published last week by the Bachtrack, a global classical music listings and review website, found that conductors are getting younger. Its top ten busiest conductors during 2014 boasted three - Latvian Andris Nelsons (Birmingham and Boston), Canadian Yannick Nezet-Seguin (Rotterdam and Philadelphia), and Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel (Simon Bolivar and Los Angeles) - in their 30s, and the average age of the top ten had dropped by a decade from 61 to 50 since 2010. There is perhaps a problem her with the word "busiest", in that Bachtrack is measuring workload entirely in terms of concert performances, which is far from all that the best conductors are about, and working regularly with a US orchestra that repeats programmes more often will inflate your position in the table. Young conducting talent emanating from or working in Scotland that we have written about in The Herald recently is not represented on the list at all, but I suspect that Robin Ticciati, Ilan Volkov and Rory Macdonald probably feel they are quite busy enough, thanks all the same.
Nonetheless, it is true that the publicity Rory's father Hugh generated when he signed Volkov, then in his 20s, to conduct the BBC SSO would probably be harder to excite now, and when the successor to Sir Simon Rattle (No7 in the Bachtrack list) is announced by the Berlin Phil, it will be no surprise at all if one of the younger chaps gets the job.
It will still, like as not, be a male person, however, and that is quite another story.
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