An orchestra conductor faces the ultimate leadership challenge: creating perfect harmony without saying a word.

Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.
 

The classical-music world has a fraught relationship with fame. On the one hand, people are always pining for the days when Arturo Toscanini, Leonard Bernstein, and Leontyne Price dominated the airwaves and appeared on the covers of magazines.
 

Amid all of the Grammy hubbub this evening surrounding Beyonce, the Black Eyed Peas and other mega-stars, it’s easy to forget that classical music is an important part of the annual nominations, accounting for 13 categories and spanning the field from orchestral works to opera and beyond.
 

Just over an hour into a rehearsal here last week, the maestro’s baton came down like the crack of a whip, and the music screeched to a halt. Long Yu, the imperious 45-year-old conductor of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, wanted perfection.
 

On Wednesday night, 30-year-old Latvian Andris Nelsons, music director of England’s City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, makes his debut at the Metropolitan Opera leading Puccini’s “Turandot.”
 

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to conduct a word-class professional orchestra?

For the first time an orchestra in mainland China is taking on a foreign music director: the French conductor Michel Plasson is becoming music director of the China National Symphony Orchestra.
 

Neville Marriner puts down his cup and saucer and waves an invisible baton around the living room of his Kensington, London, home.
 

As Valery Gergiev leads the London Symphony Orchestra in its season opener, the mesmerising, controversial conductor talks to Ed Vulliamy