In one of his recent posts, Robert Levine asks why certain conductors or so over-payed in comparison to the average musician in their ensembles, and suggests that the answer might be found in the concept of scarcity:
It is a core weakness of the orchestra industry world-wide that there are lots of good orchestra musicians and very few good conductors. Adam Smith’s invisible hand thus writes lots of trailing zeros on their paychecks.
And he suggests that our own industry is to blame:
And our industry is very poor at identifying conducting talent early. I suspect that if every professional orchestra in America devoted 10-20 services per season simply to finding conducting talent – including from within its own ranks – we’d have a lot more good conductors.
It’s interesting to note that there are a lot of orchestras hiring relatively unknown conducting talent (more or less) to fill in all of those concerts that are not covered by other members of the conducting staff or the music director, yet the system of sharing information seems to be fundamentally flawed.
Artistic administrators of the various orchestras seem to share information, but there seems to be relatively little input from the musicians involved. There is a fundamental disconnect between how a conductor is perceived from the front of the house and from the back and onstage.
A conductor can appear charming and erudite and chatty from the audience’s perspective, but be a horrible stick waver with delusions of his/her self-worth and poor rehearsal technique from the point of view of the orchestra.Â