Young conductors are getting a shot at the baton at Philadelphia Ballet’s ‘Nutcracker’

In rehearsal for The Nutcracker, Beatrice Jona Affron stops conducting, yet the billowy lush of the “Waltz of the Flowers” continues as she circles around to a spot just behind the orchestra.

Listening and watching, she starts gesturing to a young conductor who has taken over the podium, messaging cues about things happening in the ensemble that the conducting apprentice may have overlooked.

Step by step, bar by bar, this is how it’s done — how the deceptively complex art, craft, and psychological game of being a conductor gets passed from one generation to the next.

Last week’s Nutcracker coaching session is part of a new program at Philadelphia Ballet shepherded by Affron, the company’s longtime music director and conductor of the Philadelphia Ballet Orchestra. The company hosts one or two aspiring professional conductors each season to sit in on rehearsals, assist with musical and operational grunt work, and be mentored by Affron.

The ballet’s run of The Nutcracker this month publicly reveals the fruit of the program’s labors. Na’Zir McFadden, the program’s first laureate, is conducting Act I in 13 of the company’s 31 performances, and the two current apprentices are leading several performances of the overture of Tchaikovsky’s score.

If Philadelphia Ballet’s fledgling apprenticeship program needed a success story to tout, McFadden is it. After his ballet post, the Philadelphian landed a plum: assistant conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. He’s 23 years old.

Philadelphia Ballet is aiming for more triumphs like this and has so far raised $50,000 toward an endowment to help fund the program in perpetuity.

To the public, conducting is the most social of pursuits, coaxing dozens of disparate instrumental colors and musical lines into a single, cohesive interpretation. But this same social aspect of the job also makes training challenging. Young conductors can’t simply pull together 60, 80, or 100 of their closest friends to try out ideas for a Mozart or Mahler score.

And so experiences like the one offered by Philadelphia Ballet’s apprenticeship program are prized.

“It’s massively valuable, a massively rare experience to get to do this,” said Amelia Krinke, 19, a conductor, violist, and Juilliard School student in her second season with the ballet’s conducting program.

Conductors can and will do a tremendous amount of study and preparation before even lifting the baton, said Andrew Samlal, 25, the ballet’s other apprentice this season.

“But when you step on the podium with that caliber of an orchestra, it’s an experience that is difficult to describe in words. And so that’s why this apprenticeship is like a gem,” said the Philadelphian and Temple University graduate.

Because the ballet’s orchestra is so skilled and familiar with this music, “a flick of the finger can change the sound,” Krinke said.

“And so it’s like driving a sensitive car. ... It can go at 150 miles an hour with no problem, but it can also make turns,” Krinke said. And there’s a sense in which it makes you the best musician, the best conductor that you can possibly be because it allows you this freedom to do this and that, and have it responded to.”

Many music schools offer degree programs in conducting, Temple and the Curtis Institute of Music among them. But the seasoning of young conductors after school is far from prescribed, and the chances for valuable fly-on-the-wall moments came one after another in last week’s Nutcracker rehearsal.

“Cellos and basses, much more ferocious there and then diminuendo. We’re telling the whole story of the battle scene in a very short time,” Affron told the ensemble in the dreary rehearsal hall behind the Academy of Music.

“This pizzicato section should be making people wonder what’s next.”

Affron asked for a little more sound in the “Dance of the Mirlitons” so the dancers could hear it. She tuned chords by asking individual instrumental sections to play their notes, and urged a bass clarinetist to slip into a more vocal color for a spotlight moment.

“It’s a real baritone solo,” she told him.

Even when a conducting student is in school and has access to a school orchestra, “it doesn’t mean one is guaranteed all that much podium time,” Affron said in an interview after rehearsal. “If I had to tally up the amount of podium time I had in two years of my master’s program, it would be a shockingly small number of minutes.”

In addition to sitting in on rehearsals and performances, the apprentices work via Zoom, where Affron leads sessions in score analysis and even gives conducting lessons remotely.

And that covers a lot of ground.

“But the rate at which they learned today, I’m sure, is many, many times quicker and more efficient than any other way of preparing.”

Case in point: the ictus. That’s the spot in a conductor’s visual pattern that corresponds exactly to the beat.

“How does one simulate that outside of this environment? It’s just absolutely not possible knowing what one has to do in order to create an accelerando or a ritardando [speeding up or slowing down].

“These things can be talked about endlessly,” said Affron, “but they have to be experienced.”

Philadelphia Ballet performances of “The Nutcracker” continue through Dec. 30 at the Academy of Music, Broad and Locust Streets. Tickets: $25-$352. Information: philadelphiaballet.org, 215-893-1999.