It was just the other night had a fever dream, running a 101-degree temperature and twisting the sheets, not longing for my beloved John Wilson this time, but trying to fight off an infection. When I finally made it into sweet sweaty sleep I was immediately taken into a strange scenario where, for God knows what reason, I was expected to conduct, with no rehearsal, Australian composer Brett Dean’s tribute to the doomed Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, in front of an audience of 200-800 (the crowd kept stealthily increasing), among whose number were members of the orchestra I couldn’t tell apart and no one was helping me. Being a dream, there were other factors and factors conspiring to keep me from conducting the damn piece: the string section turned into one fella carrying a zither that turned into a floor harp; the stage manager was nowhere to be found and I was expected to run the lights as well; no one would give me a copy of the score. When I yelled out, “Okay, who’s got the tinfoil?” it was then I woke up.
Above John: Simon Rattle conducts the Berlin Philharmonic in Brett Dean’s “Komarov’s Fall”.
The thing is, I’ve never dreamed about conductors before, much less being one myself; never wanted to be a conductor in real life, never even thought much about the breed—until I fell in love with John, of course… And even then the question still keeps coming back to me: Well, what are they good for anyway?
Still in my dream, the moment before I woke up, I heard a tiny voice whisper: Conductors are not disposable. I take this to be a message. In fact I take this to be the message, the one I’m meant to convey. The one I’m meant to conduct. In fact I think I can make a gig out of it.
