Exit
a director at Paris’ influential
Higher Conservatory of Music and Dance, hypothesized on
French radio that woman conductors were so few due not to
institutional bias, but because
the job is too taxing. “Conducting, taking a plane, taking another plane, conducting again,”
went his rundown of the acts
women couldn’t handle.
Concurred another venerable
figure, the conductor Yuri Temirnakov: “The essence of the conductor’s profession is strength. The
essence of a woman is weakness.”
Alex Ross, the critic who
brought Temirnakov’s bizarre
new aphorism to light when he
translated it for The New Yorker
last year, wrote a week later an
apologia on his personal blog:
“Silent neglect can do just as
much damage as open contempt,”
acknowledging that his own writings rarely featured female performers and conductors until he
was called to task.
Another outcome: women
spoke. In an interview with The
Telegraph, Jude Kelly, director at
Britain’s largest arts complex, the
Southbank Centre, put the onus of
change on institutions. The question of how to juggle “childcare
CULTURE
HUFFINGTON
02.16.14
and touring,” she argued, is not
“just a female issue”:
It’s about the chaps who run
orchestras and people who run
music colleges getting behind
women. The assumption historically is that it’s only women
who worry about this... If society
wants women to reach their potential and contribute, society
has to care about it.
The conductor Yuri
Temirnakov: ‘The essence
of the conductor’s profession
is strength. The essence
of a woman is weakness.’”
Inside Weill, Tokay raised the
planes of Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie No. 2 against each other
like slabs of earth in a quake. The
players knotted their eyebrows
when despair hit, eyes on the wand.
They grinned when Tokay commanded the flute to soar. All are
graduates of the very same Paris
conservatory where Montavani, the
composer who believes women cannot stomach the job, is a director.
His students, it seems,
may disagree with him.