Leonid Grin: A Conducting Primer, Part III, Technique

Leonid Grin conducting the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Photo by David Philippi

Technique is a word that conjures method, mechanics and surgically sharpened vocabulary.

In the case of orchestral conducting, it is much more personal, said Leonid Grin, co-instructor with Neeme Järvi at the 2010 Neeme Järvi International Summer Academy in Pärnu, Estonia.

“Our technique is our language.  Our technique is our personality.  Your professors can give you general patterns, how to do this or that, but it is just a beginning.  From these patterns, you have to develop your own individual technique, because you have your own individual language.  You say, ‘my technique’ and we speak about manual technique, but that is the smallest part of a conductor’s technique, 25 percent at the most.”

A conductor’s technique comprises all of one’s body, said Russian born Grin, a protege of Leonard Bernstein and former music director of the San Jose Symphony. “Verbal ability, gestures, mimics, face, expression, eyes, posture.  If you go on the podium and you conduct like a 75-year-old person with arthritis, but you’re just 25 years old . . . You can’t stand like this.  Your posture presents your assurance, your image."

A conductor does not play an instrument like the rest of the orchestra, Grin stressed. “Where is the sound that you produce?  It’s your own body.  Everything from your head to the very lowest part of your body.  Like a singer, it’s all your resonator.  That is where our sound forms.  That’s why every conductor has his or her individual sound.  That’s why when we hear (Carlo Maria) Giulini conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic, it has one sound, when (Gustavo) Dudamel conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonia it has a different sound, and when Zubin Mehta conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic, it has a third sound.”

Posture is very important, said Grin, who now teaches privately in Philadelphia.  “If you bend your neck, you cut off the upper resonator.  Your will lose a lot of timbre.  When you bend, you weaken the intensity so you will have no сила (Russian for “force”).”  Conducting should begin mid-level and build from there, he said.

Force, he said implies ego, a trait which conductors are assumed to possess in over-abundance.  Here, Grin quoted William Steinberg (1899-1978), conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony:  “A conductor is one who is capable of making the work speak for itself.  One who, besides integrity, has intuition and inspiration and who can have enough modesty to hide himself from the eyes of a crowd craving for entertainment, or to be provoked.”

“In other words,” said Grin, “hide your ego.  ‘My Bach, my Beethoven, my Mozart.’  It’s not mine.  Mozart belongs to Mozart, Beethoven belongs to Beethoven.  Our task as a conductor is to do the best we can to move into the world of the composer we are studying.  In my life, hundreds of people have asked me ‘Who is your favorite composer?’  I have just one answer to this: ‘The one I am conducting tonight.’  If I don’t feel this way, I should not conduct tonight.  I will not do a good job for the composer.”

Grin said that in addition to reading and dissecting a score he tries to get whatever information he can about the composer and the circumstances under which the work was written.  “These days we have so much information about the inner world of Schumann, for instance, his illusions, his sexual issues, his psychology.  When I conduct Wagner’s ‘Siegfried Idyll,’ I have to read the score over and over and the letter he wrote to his wife over and over because Wagner’s spirit is there.”

Returning to a work one has conducted many times previously is another issue.  “That was another piece," said Grin, associate conductor of the Moscow Philharmonic before immigrating to the U.S. in 1981.  "If I know in three weeks I have to do Brahms’ Second Symphony for the 26^th time in my life, I will spend two weeks from the very beginning, as I did before.  I listen to my performances in different periods of my life.  I do not repeat myself.  Something every time is different.  It’s new.  Whatever you do, do it as you do it the first time.”

See parts I and II in “Features” on this site.

(to be continued)