Eyes Benefit from Conductor

June 26, 2006

From The Register-Guard
By Bob Keefer

Eugene ophthalmologist Dr. I. Howard Fine has attended every single Oregon Bach Festival since the very first one was held here in 1970. But his experience at the festival last year, the doctor says, changed his life.

That was because his wife, Vicky, had arranged for him to audit festival artistic director Helmuth Rilling’s master class in conducting. The intensive class, designed for professional musicians, forms a behind-the-scenes core for the 2 1/2 -week international music festival. This year’s festival, the 37th edition, begins Thursday.

“It was a birthday present,” Fine said. “It was the biggest surprise of my life. I love music. I am not really gifted in music. But frequently I have said that if I could be a conductor I would give up everything for that, I would be so thrilled.”

Being an auditor in the class, Fine, who travels and teaches around the world about his surgical techniques, didn’t get to conduct the orchestra.

But he did take off work for the entire festival and sat in on the class, in which a group of 14 musicians studied conducting technique with Rilling, a world-renowned interpreter of Bach.

The master surgeon found a lot to like in the master conductor.

“What was fascinating to me was, he taught how to conduct using precision,” Fine said. “The benefit of small movements that add to precision. And control. The conductor has to convey to the musicians that he is in control. And clarity! He talked about clarity, clearly conveying the message of the music.”

About 40 auditors sit in on the festival’s Master Class in Choral-Orchestral Conducting, as it’s formally known, each year.

The class costs $750 to audit and $1,075 for the regular conductors. The 2:30 p.m. rehearsals before Rilling’s 5 p.m. Discovery Series festival concerts, at which the students conduct, are open to the public at no charge. Check oregonbachfestival.com for locations and dates.

The class keeps its students busy for 12-hour days during the 17-day festival, studying everything a professional conductor of Bach’s music might need to know, from how to structure and plan rehearsals to the finer points of German diction and theology.

They practice conducting under Rilling’s guidance and finally conduct several performances of cantatas and other works at the festival.

Rilling works with the language of conducting, Fine said, and that’s not much different from the language of running an operating room.

“I realized there are many analogies to working in an operating room,” the doctor said. “The surgeon is the conductor. What we have to do is make sure everyone’s together and on the same page.”

Fine’s observation doesn’t surprise Tom Somerville, a class alumnus who has been teaching part of the class for more than two decades.

Rilling, he says, teaches a high level of leadership skills that translate to many other professions.

As a result, Somerville said, recent class auditors have included leaders from nonmusical fields, such as a Eugene police lieutenant and the late Tom Wildish, whose family runs the Eugene gravel and construction business.

“Tom didn’t know a whole lot about music,” Somerville said. “So I tried to draw comparisons between looking at a musical score to the way an engineer looks at an architect’s drawings. The performer, the conductor, has to fill in blanks, just as an engineer does.”

Fine was so enthralled by his experience last year he’s done three presentations about it at medical conferences. And he’s going to be back again this year, auditing the entire 17-day class once again.

But the surgeon still doesn’t expect to conduct the orchestra.

“I don’t think I can do that,” he said. “I think it takes more talent than I have. In the same way that I enjoy sports without being an athlete, I can enjoy this without doing it.”