A week or so ago, I was having a discussion with a distinguished reader of All is Yar about evaluating conductors, and I was reminded of a rather amusing conductor rating survey that was circulated a few years back among members of an organization of which I was a part.  The form itself was not used by us, but rather by some unknown orchestra, apparently located in European.  Judging by the font and design, I’m guessing it is a few decades old or someone took great pains to make it look that way.

It’s not exactly a textbook design for a survey:  for example, it really makes no sense to give the best categories an eight-point range of 20-13 while only allocating a single point to each of the bottom three categories.

That said,  the descriptions employed by its author are  pretty freakin’ funny nonetheless.  I can think of all the conductors under which I’ve performed and which descriptions I’d apply to them.  A couple of my favorites:

• In “Personality:”  The distinction between “ordinary (pleasant)” and “ordinary (unpleasant)”
• In “Rehearsal Ability:”  The case of a conductor “accomplishing something but boring”