Conduct becomes so romantic...

Romanticism is a difficult word to define, but anybody in search of a working definition could do a lot worse than observe the young conductor Lance Oliver in action with his orchestra, the Southend Philharmonic.

On the podium Lance Oliver is a man convulsed. He is a man drowning under the damburst of music. He is simultaneously the possessed figure who released that music.

His gaunt body convulses as if struck by lightning. Passion may be an unfashionable quality in the cool 1990s, but it transfixes Lance Oliver.

Lance himself admits that a conductor can fly almost too close to the sun: "The concentration can be very intense during a performance - indeed, you can get too involved.

"I'm sometimes only aware of the impact that the music has had on me, of the sheer adrenaline of music, at the end of a performance, when people say: "Lance . . . your face!"

Meeting Lance away from the concert hall, at leisure in his home in Thundersley, you come down to earth with something of a bump.

He is a professional (Guildhall-qualified) musician with his feet firmly on the ground. He is articulate and wry, he talks as much about contracts and job opportunities as about music - and his girl-friend is a dentist. How unromantic can you get?

Of course, even a conductor can't spend all his time in the musical clouds. Spend just a few minutes with Lance and you are left in no doubt as to the real basis of music-making, romantic or otherwise.

It is, of course, hard graft. For every minute on the podium, there are hours of preparation, pouring over the score, not to mention the grind of rehearsals.

Lance actually uses the words "pain and suffering", another badge of the romantic artist, when he refers to the process: "It's a constant challenge to find a fresh way of getting the music across.

"It stretches you. You really struggle to do the best you can with that piece of music.

"I sit with the score, I study it and eventually I wrest my own idea from it. Only after that will I listen to a recording.

"Listen to the music any earlier and it would be difficult not to copy it. You cease to be an artist if you do that."

The strains are compounded by the fact that, at the end of the day, the Southend Philharmonic is an amateur orchestra. Its members play, as its title suggests, for love of music, not money.

Lance appreciates that: "People have their lives to lead and work to do, and they can't always be there. At the end of the day, a professional orchestra is paid to sit there. But it can be frustrating."

At last, however, comes the performance. Lance glows at the prospect: "The concert goes more or less the way you want it to, you've pulled it out of the bag, you've done justice to the music, the audience are wiser because of it. That makes all the pain and suffering superfluous."

Whatever the drawbacks, this is the road that Lance has chosen. Way back, at Greensward School, his teacher was heard to remark: "That guy will succeed in anything in music."

Lance was still at SEEVIC when he gave his first performance, as a conductor. Or is performance the word? Lance says, rather sternly: "Conducting shouldn't be designer-packaged just to look good for the audience."

At 31, his wish now is to be a full-time professional conductor. Hopefully that baton will one day pay the rent as well as conjure the music. He is certainly qualified - he studied conducting for a year at the Royal School of Music, on top of his other training - and he looks more at home in black tails than a sweat-shirt.

Just like any other technician he is constantly building up his tradecraft. "You file away little tips and tricks as you go along, for use another day," he confides. Yet any actor or coal-miner who thinks they've got employment problems should take a look at the job scene for conductors. "There is," Lance says, "a LOT of competition.

"After all, if you think of an orchestra, there are lots of violinists, so lots of violinists' jobs - but there's only one guy up there conducting.

"You do what you can to make things happen - but there just is no set way of going about it, no clear-cut path to being a conductor."

Musical pros are tough critters, however, and Lance isn't going to let a little impasse like this cast a damper on either his life or his music.

"As soon as you start making any sort of grand plan, needs and opportunities take you in the opposite direction," he says, surprisingly cheerfully for somebody who has just pronounced yet another variation of Murphy's Law. At least, as a violinist as well as a conductor, he has another four strings to his bow.

Between sessions with the Philly, Lance works up the adrenaline in a different way, as he pursues the frenetic life of a freelance violinist: "The phone goes at 10pm. 'Can you be at Abbey Road by 9am tomorrow?'

"Sight reading is all important. If you can't play a piece of music the moment you first set your eyes on it, you don't get a second chance."

In a typical week Lance has backed Luciano Pavarotti one night, Bonnie Langford the next, played a session with the Royal Philharmonic, then come home to Southend for the regular Thursday rehearsal.

Yet contrasted with the drama and adventure of conducting, even a schedule like this can seem pretty small beer. "Sometimes it can test you, when the music isn't 'musically fulfilling', as we call it," says Lance. "It's been said that the biggest danger to an artist is routine."

So Lance has ensured that, even for him, there is one place where music is purely for pleasure.

He explains: "I'm in this string quartet, and we just get together for a bit of fun in each other's homes. It beats watching television."

Even here, Lance sometimes has to fight not to let the music take possession of him. "These things just have a habit of progressing," he says. "We find it spiralling out of control and before long somebody says: 'We should do this piece in concert.'

"But then reason intervenes and says: 'Hey fellas, just for once this is strictly for fun.' "

Lance Oliver conducts the Southend Philharmonic this Saturday at Southend High School for Boys, 7.30pm. Tickets on the door.

A passionate man - Music is everything to Lance Oliver, conductor of the Southend Philharmonic

<Picture: ANDY PALMER

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.