What does a concertmaster actually do? Our critic pulls back the curtain as the BSO searches for its next leader.

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But in Boston, the question of what exactly concertmasters do, and what makes a good one, has particular relevance these days. Thats because over at Symphony Hall, in addition to welcoming its new president, Gail Samuel, and enduring the fallout of a pandemic that has struck at its core ethos of live performance, the Boston Symphony Orchestra has been quietly searching for its next concertmaster. Whomever they appoint to this coveted chair will hold a tenured position occupied by only three violinists over the course of the last century.

In keeping with tradition, the BSO is conducting its search beneath a Vatican-like veil of secrecy. According to orchestra officials, an announcement is unlikely this season, but lets hope it arrives at least within the calendar year. Violinist Malcolm Lowe, who from his spot at the conductors elbow lofted up impeccable solos for 35 years, retired in 2019. Since then, BSO violinists Tamara Smirnova, Alexander Velinzon, and Elita Kang have been stepping in with grace and distinction, but since the orchestras founding in 1881, the post has never been vacant this long.

Former Boston Symphony concertmaster Malcolm Lowe retired in 2019.Stu Rosner

While the audition process plays out inside Symphony Hall and the rest of us wait for smoke signals, its a good time to remind ourselves of the role these elite fiddlers actually play, why concertmasters matter in the first place, and what is at stake in the BSOs upcoming choice.

Spoiler alert: a lot.

Yes, on the orchestral stage, the conductors will still reign. But when it comes to shaping the ensembles collective musical identity and shaping its actual sound the person waving a stick on the podium has a distinct disadvantage: the baton itself is silent.

The concertmaster is therefore the central node of the orchestral circuitry, the place where a conductors intention first gets translated into music, the week-by-week symbolic face of the orchestra as a communal entity, and a de facto leader of public musical life.

Often referred to in Europe simply as leaders, concertmasters also style the orchestras sound through their choice of bowings; they routinely perform solo passages within larger works, and occasionally play full-fledged concertos as soloists with the orchestra. And at least in the days of yore, many concertmasters would also conduct, serving as assistants prepared to step onto the podium whenever necessary. Two storied BSO concertmasters past, Richard Burgin and Joseph Silverstein, were also formally titled conductors with the orchestra.

Concertmaster Joseph Silverstein conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood. Walter Scott

The role requires a rare combination of skills, both learned and native, beginning with a prodigious musical gift. In the introduction to her book Americas Concertmasters, Anne Mischakoff Heiles notes that concertmasters might be compared to elite athletes except that their careers span far more years, depend on broader knowledge and diplomacy, and require not only artistry but greater consistency: What basketball player is expected to make every free throw?

Exactly. When the concertmasters solo comes from the pure-toned spiritual benediction of the Sanctus movement in Beethovens Missa Solemnis to those extroverted fiddle soliloquies in Strausss Ein Heldenleben and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme they are expected to nail it not just technically but artistically. Every. Single. Time.

The role also requires a master diplomats ability to lead not from above but from within a body of some 100 players, to lead by example, all without placing oneself above colleagues or producing a soloistic sound that sticks out from the acoustic blend. Violinist Jorja Fleezanis, who served for two decades as concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra, compares it to being at the bow of a ship.

When the ship starts to move, she said during a recent interview, youre there at the initial crash of the waves but you also cant be way ahead of the back of the boat. And you have to know where the timpani is going to place that beat, where first horn or trumpet are going to place it. You need to be hearing the whole score and acting as a second in command to the conductor. You need to understand all the possible interpretive ways the conductor can go at that moment, so youre prepared to make a sharp left, or a gentle left. And you create that unification, that sense of together, almost instantaneously.

Glenn Dicterow, former concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, emphasized a similar cocktail of diplomacy and clairvoyance. I think this is the most difficult position in the whole orchestra to fill, he said. You have to be a chameleon, a soloist yet also someone who blends in, a politician yet also a colleague to your fellow string players. And the conductor has to feel that he has a complete ally sitting in that first chair. Its so complex. But when push comes to shove and the red light goes on, its up to you to establish that sound.

Ever since the dawn of humans making music together, somebody had to lead. According to one 19th-century source, the misty origins of musical leadership date back to 709 BC, when the superbly named Pherekydes of Patrae, Giver of Rhythm conducted some 800 fellow Greeks with a golden staff.

In the Baroque and classical periods, some of the first concertmasters were actually the composers themselves, as Bach, Gluck, and Haydn could lead their compositions while playing violin, at times conducting with their bows. Their graceful tracery was apparently preferable to the more blunt alternative, exercised by some in those days, of marking time by rhythmically pounding a large staff on the floor in front of the orchestra. This latter technique ultimately proved not just rather intrusive to the listening experience but also fatal in the case of poor Jean-Baptiste Lully. During a performance of his Te Deum, this leading light of the French Baroque was banging away with his large staff when he misplaced one particularly vigorous downbeat and skewered his own foot. The injury turned gangrenous and led to his death.

In the 19th century, the great soloists of the era were also, often, great concertmasters. High priest of the violin Joseph Joachim, for whom Brahms wrote his beloved Violin Concerto, was himself concertmaster of Liszts orchestra at Weimar, and the revered soloist Ferdinand David ruled the strings at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. That is, until Felix Mendelssohn turned up one day with his own conducting baton and helped usher in a revolution in orchestral direction. One period account refers to the frowns of the Fiddlers, whose authority Mendelssohns baton so completely usurped.

Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim was the most revered soloist of his day as well as concertmaster, for a period, in Liszt’s orchestra at Weimar.Hulton Archive

Concertmasters, even the greatest among them, never wrested that authority back. But if power remains unevenly distributed between the frowning fiddlers and todays star conductors, their symbiotic relationship is still critical to an orchestra thriving. In the best cases, they develop a kind of telepathic bond, where the conductors intentions are intuited without words. Or given the frequent paucity of rehearsal time, and many orchestral players congenital distaste for conductors who talk too much from the podium, concertmasters and their bosses learn to speak a compressed gestural shorthand, where the quickest glance or smallest movement of the finger can telegraph the entire contour of a phrase, the texture of a pianissimo.

The BSOs very first concertmaster, Bernhard Listemann, studied with both Joachim and David. So crucial did BSO founder Henry Higginson regard his role that he selected Listemann before he had even hired a conductor. Prior to arriving in Boston, Richard Burgin, the Warsaw-born BSO concertmaster from 1920 to 1962, had occupied the same chair in orchestras led by Richard Strauss and Jean Sibelius. When the revered Jascha Heifetz was first learning the Sibelius Violin Concerto, he found his way to Burgins Brookline home for a lesson.

A print showed a group portrait of six members of the Mendelssohn Quintette Club of Boston; at far left is Bernhard Listemann, the BSO’s first concertmaster. Library of Congress

Burgins successor, Joseph Silverstein, who held the post from 1962 to 1984, is still warmly remembered by many local concertgoers for his honeyed tone and expressive eloquence, qualities that come through clearly even in archival footage. BSO violinist Sheila Fiekowsky once told the Globe that simply knowing Silverstein was at the helm of the strings on a given night influenced the way you played your instrument every minute you were on that stage. He had an elegance about his playing, which permeated the entire string section. Perhaps the entire orchestra.

Former BSO concertmaster Joseph SilversteinShareAs the Boston Symphony Orchestra searches for its next concertmaster, our critic pulls back the curtain on this essential orchestral role. (Video courtesy of Boston Symphony Orchestra)Concertmaster Joseph SilversteinBSO Archives

For all of these reasons, the choice now facing the Boston Symphony and its music director Andris Nelsons is a consequential one. More than any other personnel decision that Nelsons will face, his choice of a concertmaster will determine his own lasting impact on the sound and the internal culture of the orchestra.

After making it through the entire audition process, the player Nelsons chooses will surely possess the technical skills to succeed. But leadership style and musical personality could vary widely. And in addition to all the other requisite qualifications, there remains the X factor of chemistry. For Nelsons to continue growing as an artist, and for him to give the BSO his best, he must select someone with whom he feels an intuitive musical connection and a sense of security when he wants to take artistic risks. The persons musicality should vibrate on a kindred frequency in both how they play but also how they experience music.

Music director Andris Nelsons at BSO Opening Night at Symphony Hall on Sept. 30, 2021.Aram Boghosian

This is also the moment for Nelsons and the orchestra to think carefully about an elusive and rarely discussed aspect of an orchestras string culture the question of whether or how a section physically moves as it plays. In recent decades, many of the top European orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic and the Leipzig Gewandhaus, have been setting their string players free, allowing them, if they so choose, to let the musics expressive and rhythmic impulses visibly register in the body, as is the norm in chamber music.

In practice, when those same players are intensely invested in the music-making, all the way to the back of the section, the accumulated energy tends to leap off the stage. You feel it in the hall but also hear it in the music. In a recent phone interview, Thomas Morris, former BSO general manager who went on to run the Cleveland Orchestra across a period when its own culture of movement shifted quite notably (prompted by a new concertmaster), recalled the change had a palpable effect on the sound of the Cleveland strings, making it more flexible and more emotional, he said.

Such freedom of movement may not be actively prohibited at the BSO, but clearly it has not been encouraged. This is a larger topic for another time, but these are the types of seemingly entrenched ensemble norms that the next concertmaster could influence deeply, if they chose to do so.

These days the classical field as a whole is also reckoning with its own legacies of exclusion legacies clearly reflected in the annals of concertmaster history. In most big American orchestras, the chair has always been held by white men. At her post in Minnesota, Fleezanis was among the countrys first female concertmasters. She thinks we wont see more women in these roles until there are more female music directors. Shes probably right which is yet another reason why change must begin at the top.

If past is any previous, whomever the BSO picks will be around much longer than the conductor who appoints them. And unlike many music directors these days, concertmasters live in town. Theyre here the whole season. And they should ideally maintain a real presence in the citys broader musical life.

So even more important than choosing quickly, the orchestra must choose wisely. The role is dauntingly difficult, the stakes are high and the next chapter of the Nelsons-era BSO is waiting to be written.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at [email protected], or follow him on Twitter @Jeremy_Eichler.

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