Can anyone conduct?

Richard Sparks directs me to "Maestro," another reality TV show, this time about non-musicians playing the role of orchestral conductor.

Here's a bit of the show's premise:

Eight famous amateurs with a passion for classical music will do battle this summer for the chance to conduct the BBC Concert Orchestra in front of a live audience of 30,000 in BBC Two's Maestro.

The show sees a diverse range of personalities – including hiphop star Goldie, Blur bassist Alex James and actress Jane Asher – competing to perform at BBC Proms In The Park, held in London's Hyde Park, as part of the BBC Proms' world-famous Last Night celebrations on 13 September 2008.

Sparks gives a bit of commentary on the show as he features it on his blog:

I'll be honest, I don't think the "conducting" part of conducting is the most difficult part. Many famous musicians have turned to conducting at some point in their careers, and successfully. Others have not been so successful, such as Dietrich Fisher-Diskau (as an aside, when he told Otto Klemperer that he'd be conducting a Schubert symphony the next week, Klemperer reportedly growled back, "And I'll be singing Winterreise.")

But those musicians who made a successful career in conducting were musicians with a thorough training and background before making the switch. Lebrecht says, "Consider Maestro on a relative scale of values. What if the BBC tried a talent show for new heart surgeons, with the winner performing a live angioplasty after five days’ boot camp and three weeks on the ward? Unthinkable, you’d say, it’s a matter of life and death. . . But music? Anyone can do music. You don’t have to give up childhood and six years in conservatory to sing Nessun Dorma or conduct Turandot. Four weeks of being taught how to fake it and you can fool the world. That’s what the BBC is putting over in Maestro: the principle that art is unimportant and the public are plain mugs."

Read Richard Sparks blog here.
Read more about "Maestro" here.