At one point or another, we’ve probably all crossed paths with a fraud of a conductor; you know, the type who spends more time dancing on the podium and wallowing in baton shtick thinking it “looks good” rather than inspiring a stage full of musicians and serving as the catalyst for a transcending live concert experience. Fortunately, for those who may not be 100 percent certain, there’s now a quick and easy test to figure it out.
<Ahem> In the voice of Jeff Foxworthy: your conductor might be a fraud if…
…his/her podium antics work when synced to Gangnam Style.
I’m confident someone could put an app together for this; just snap a video of your conductor using the phone’s video camera and the app attempts a Gangnam Style sync and you’ll have your results in under two minutes.
H/T to Norm Lebrecht for that chestnut and another h/t to Holly Mulcahy for posting a link to the original video and audio at her Facebook page (of Simonov’s performance, not Psy’s video):
There’s a good bit of entertaining conversation going on via Facebook with composers using President Trump’s Covfefe #TwitterFail as inspiration for #SubversiveArt. One of…
Drew–Are there really phony conductors?
More or less.
i worked for a few in my time. The post-concert bar post-mortems got pretty rowdy.
If there was ever a reality show that needs to be made, that’s the one.
Would be non-stop marveling.
That’s Yuri Simonov, and in my experience he’s the real deal.
The orchestra sounds terrific. Really exciting. What’s your point?
The point is, the orchestra sound ‘terrific’ in spite of the nonsensical antics of the conductor.