Tonight, 97-year-old Herbert Blomstedt will climb to the Royal Festival Hall podium in London to conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra. For those of us who anticipate spending our dotage watching Loose Women in our pyjamas, this is chastening news. By the time I reach 97, I don’t expect I’ll be able to lift a baton, never mind put one of the world’s leading orchestras through its paces in a performance of Mozart’s Fourth Violin Concerto, and then come back after the interval to conduct Mahler’s Ninth – a symphony whose usual running time is 90 minutes. Even the prospect of standing for an hour and half in white tie and tails is enough to give me conniptions.
But conductors are made of sterner stuff. During the last century, when global average life expectancy was 46 years in 1950, rising to 66 by 1999, many great conductors lived and worked into their 80s and 90s. Pablo Casals died aged 96, Nadia Boulanger at 92 and Arturo Toscanini at 89. Leopold Stokowski, renowned for conducting the Disney movie Fantasia, conducted in public at 91, was still recording at 93 and died aged 95.
Today, when according to the World Health Organization average global life expectancy is 71, many classical conductors are in gainful employment in the world’s most renowned concert halls long after their seventh decade. The list includes Christoph von Dohnányi (95), Richard Bonynge (94) Roger Norrington (90), Zubin Mehta (88), Charles Dutoit (88), Neeme Järvi (87), Marek Janowski (85), Riccardo Muti (83), Lothar Zagrosek (82) and Daniel Barenboim (82).
True, Barenboim did resign as general music director of the Berlin State Opera last year due to his declining health but said: “Of course, I will stay – as long as I live – closely connected to music and am ready to conduct.”
Ten years ago, I interviewed the great conductor and violinist Neville Marriner on the eve of his 90th birthday. His diary was teeming with concert dates in Japan, China and Germany and he anticipated spending any downtime recording a couple of Mozart piano concerti with the Academy of St Martin’s in the Fields, the orchestra he founded. “It’s very hard to say no.” Why? “Optimism or fatalism – I don’t know,” said Sir Neville, who died in 2016. “Maybe a hangover from the early days when you’d worry about where the next job was coming from. As soon as something came in, you’d say, ‘Yes!’ You never get out of the habit.” This makes intuitive sense, even if having the sensibility of a member of the self-employed precariat was hardly what one might have expected from a feted musician in his late-life pomp.
In 1956, MetLife Insurance researchers identified 437 orchestral conductors and followed them for 20 years, they concluded that conductors live 38% longer lives than the rest of us. They keep time in more ways than one. But what would explain their longevity? One theory, advanced by Dale L Anderson MD, is that conducting is good cardiovascular exercise. Indeed, Anderson’s 1997 book The Orchestra Conductor’s Secret to Health & Long Life: Conducting and Other Easy Things to Do to Feel Better, Keep Fit, Lose Weight, Increase Energy, and Live Longer offers an exercise programme based on conductors’ gestures that Anderson claimed strengthen heart and lungs, improve posture, flexibility, and balance, help one lose weight and increase joy through raising endorphin levels. “Your arms are an underused source of energy, fitness and health,” said Anderson. “A fun and effective way to exercise your arms is to ‘jog’ your arms to happy invigorating music.” What Anderson called J’ARMing involves synchronising arm and hand movements with music, not necessarily while waving a baton. He reckoned doing so would result in the creation of neurons, thereby increasing inter-connectivity within the brain.
It’s become commonplace to suggest that playing a musical instrument is good for mental health. Perhaps conducting is too. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Exeter published a study that reportedly found that playing a musical instrument, particularly the piano, is linked to improved memory and the ability to solve complex tasks. The study also suggested that singing was associated with better brain health, possibly because of the social benefits of being part of a musical group.
Anne Corbett, Exeter’s professor of dementia research, said: “Being musical could be a way of harnessing the brain’s agility and resilience, known as cognitive reserve.” You would think conductors have more cognitive reserve than you can shake a stick at – to conduct an orchestra involves complex tasks such as keeping time, sensitively interpreting a long dead genius’s score, not to mention massaging the musicians’ egos and inducing them to share your musical vision. All of that sounds good for one’s brain and soul, and, just possibly, for one’s life expectancy.
For Blomstedt, music remains so endlessly joyful and fascinating that quitting is scarcely thinkable. “Retirement is not a question of age,” he has said, “it should be flexible. I just love the music so much that I just can’t give up. There are always things that I want to learn. I’m never satisfied. I’m happy for the results we get now and then, but I’m not really satisfied. Satisfaction lies in the hope of even better possibilities in the future, and I want to take all those chances.”
• Herbert Blomstedt conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra on 21 November at the Royal Festival Hall, London.
