Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras by Tom Service: review In his excellent new book Music as Alchemy, the critic Tom Service acknowledges that some conductors have only themselves to blame for their image as the guy at the front hogging all the attention while the musicians labour to produce the sound. Yet he has a passionate admiration for their art stemming from his own disappointed ambition. As a teenager, he imitated his heroes Toscanini and Karajan in front of the mirror. His account follows six conductors - Valery Gergiev, Mariss Jansons, Jonathan Nott, Simon Rattle, Iván Fischer and Claudio Abbado - as they rehearse and then perform a certain piece. He interviews the conductors and, crucially, the musicians they lead. Building a relationship between orchestra and conductor is key - something which the BBC's Maestro at the Opera, a reality show in which celebrities tried to conduct musicians they have never met before, failed to grasp. Simon Rattle was a surprise choice when he took over the Berlin Philharmonic in 2002. They had only had two conductors in 50 years and had developed their own German sound and tight repertoire. But they voted for Rattle to take them out of their comfort zone. Service sees Rattle rehearse Sibelius's Fifth, Sixth and Seventh symphonies. The Finnish composer is generally looked down on in Germany as a composer of "film music" whose work, in the words of Adorno, is "stricken with impotence." He had his work cut out to convince them. Rattle's approach is a passionate pleading for the players to push themselves in expressing the clarity of each note. Since he left Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Berlin, Rattle has taken the edge off his style allowing the musicians greater expressive freedom. Speaking in pidgin-German for instructions and in English for the jokes (the players tell Service they often don't get his humour), Rattle gently coaxes out a performance they didn't know was in them. As even the large egos of Berlin acknowledge, no matter how brilliant each individual musician, you need a conductor to shape a performance. The best ones do so with sensitivity. Rattle's predecessor in Berlin, Claudio Abbado, has always been known for his smooth style but at 78 years old he is unlikely to be barking instructions. Watching him prepare Debussy's Nocturnes with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Service notes that when they don't play in time - the musicians have been thrown together from all over the world and don't know one another - he simply asks them to go again without correction. Of all the conductors here, Abbado trusts the skill of his players the most. As the violinist Kolja Blacher tells Service, Abbado works in a democratic spirit that values personal freedom. And it's much easier when somebody just tells you what to do. After reading Service's enthralling study, you come to recognise that the conductor should be more like a teacher everyone wants to impress than a dictator whose instructions must be obeyed. After all, the word conductor can mean both someone who actively directs and someone who allows themselves to channel the electric charge of the music. Follow Sameer Rahim's Opera Novice column at telegraph.co.uk/opera Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras by Tom Service 292pp, Faber & Faber t £16.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) Telegraph Books (rrp £18.99, ebook £12.86)