Page 297 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

Tár’s orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, is self-governed, famous for its lengthy
process to choose its chief conductor. Yet her behaviour reveals how vulnerable those
principles can be to an overbearing authority figure – she proceeds to “rotate out” her
assistant conductor, and seemingly rigs caucuses in favour of a player she has her eye
on. “She has to pretend to play into the democratic structures that exist there,” says Dr
Anna Bull, author of Class, Control and Classical Music. “But Lydia’s perspective is that
it isn’t a democracy. Instead, it plays into the cult of personality.”

Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in 1976. Photograph: Everett
Collection/Alamy

The vicissitudes of the person at the podium, however, are just one challenge faced by
orchestral musicians. In Tár, there’s a glimpse of the final stage of the process to select a
new cellist; by that point, they would be past multiple auditions to whittle down a group
of musicians who probably started playing before their teens, studied at conservatoires,
cut their teeth in the weird world of orchestral odd-jobs as a rookie freelancer – choral
societies, function bands, one-off scratch performances – and endured similar
unsuccessful auditions for positions at opposite ends of the country. It’s a gruelling
process even to get to the trial stage, where a handful of players are placed on rotation
so that both player and orchestra can get a feel of the orchestra. At that point, when
factors such as “a good fit” within a section become crucial, it’s easy to see how different
hierarchies can dissolve into one another.

Orchestras have tended to have a pyramid power structure, with the conductor at the
top, and everyone else further down: a principal player above a sub-principal, both
ahead of a “tutti” or section player, and all ahead of a “dep” – a non-permanent player
deputising. “It’s very important to differentiate between the artistic hierarchy and the
social, personal and political hierarchy, which, for me, shouldn’t be the same structure,”
says Dave Rimbault, a tutti violin at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and a
union rep for the Musicians’ Union. “Historically, across the sector, there was an issue
where that was mirrored.”

These structures quickly develop their own internal codes – such as the orchestra
finding “subtle ways of letting conductors know that they’re not happy”, says Bull. From
pointed looks between principal players to the moment clarinettist Knut Braun scrawls
a cross on to his sheet music of Mahler 5 to mark Tár’s fall from grace, Todd Field’s film
sheds light on a mini-vocabulary of behaviours that allows the orchestra a secret form
of communication. A discreet rub of the trousers mid-performance to congratulate a