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.
