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It's too easy to grumble about conductors, we all do it - but, to be fair, we rely on them for inspiration - which is why we grumble. Maybe I should start a book of conductors' mots justes. Andrew showered us with gestures and stories - inspiring, amusing, and full of deeply thoughtful ideas. An example: Rehearsing his orchestration of the last unfinished number in Art of Fugue, in which Bach never says how loud to play, he explained that in baroque music every interval, every step up or down, is a gesture - its strength and volume to be determined by the size of the step itself. A single whole tone step = insignificant, three notes = quite important, four or five notes = 'notice me', six notes = 'this is it!' (just natural physical gestures, like we do when we talk). Then there's the "Hi, Mum" gesture - like on TV when someone leaps out from behind the interviewee and waves to the camera. Think gestures, not notes. No need to ask how loud we should be playing. The life of the music is in the conversation, and we create that conversational life only as we allow others to be heard. Simple, really. Another striking image he gave us: As we reach the end of this fugue, we might like to imagine Bach saying good-bye to each of us as he writes what will be his last note for us to play. This deliberate 'unfinishing' was a profound gesture: He knew he was running out of time to finish his next task - a chorale prelude on Before Your throne I now appear. This was the end of his road - about forty thousand pages of genius music in twenty five years. Blinded by an English quack, he'd had a stroke, and he knew he was finished.

Sometimes, when a conductor says something particularly arresting, a player notes it on their copy. In 1984, when George Hurst was rehearsing the Rosamunde music (which we played last Thursday), he expostulated, "Bugger the bloody conductor", and that was duly noted in the 2nd desk cello part. What did he mean....? My informed guess is that he was trying to tell us we wouldn't get the essential and elusive lightness, dancing and crying, by watching the bloody conductor. So, what is needed? Andrew Manze gave us a clue: Imagine the musicians who'd been booked to play Schubert's Rosamunde - every day of their lives was spent playing menuets and contradances, hack music by indifferent composers, trivialities to titillate the bored bourgeoisie. The poor players were jaded. (Rightly so - professional musicians should never be expected to do that.) Then, one day, they find themselves playing Schubert's sublime ballet music. Did they notice the difference? Did we, last Thursday......? "Wow, this is something else". And that thought started me musing over the enigma of Schubert's Unfinished.

But first, I'd like to take a stroll into the maze of Schubert's life. What did the world look like from inside Franz? He suffered from depression. He couldn't hold down a job, he lived off handouts from friends. He needed money for food, which meant that dubious characters could easily buy ringside seats at the arena of his genius..... Stop! We're already far enough into this maze of dysfunction. We don't know forwards from backwards. We hesitate - depressed. Hope evaporates - tomorrow disappears from view. We push comfort aside and snarl with disbelief and derision. Joy inverts - white is black, like a negative photo. But tomorrow does come, and the cold clinging fog of despair evaporates in the sun, as if it never existed. Black becomes white again. This is his life. This is life for thousands. Tasks can't be finished. New ideas hijack our attention, each new idea promising to blot out the recent pain. (In the west, depression is the second most costly and disruptive illness, and there is no consensus within the NHS on how to treat it). Listen 'in' to Schubert - he's sitting in the middle of his maze singing his story for you. Let's get back to the Unfinished: The most famous tune, the second subject in the first movement (played by the cellos, of course) isn't really a tune - or is it? Well, it's the tune that everybody can recognise and sing........but this is a strange tune - it doesn't finish, it doesn't resolve - it disintegrates, droops, goes all uncertain, gasps to a halt. Silence. A whole bar of nothing. Not quite enough time for the audience to think, 'Hey, what's going on here'. Not quite enough time to get embarrassed and fidget, like the audience did as the Bach fugue petered out. Perhaps this silence is the loudest cry in this symphony. If you love Schubert, then accompany him down in this silence - and keep quiet, don't try to 'make it all nice' for him. This melancholy stasis is goaded away by a soulfully raging chord - a heaving groan of frustration. Halfway through the movement, in the part called the development, the opening cello and bass tune is repeated (Andrew asked us to use a "private vibrato" here, to create a type of sound that won't reveal anything to the audience). This time the tune proceeds on, and on, but downwards into uncertainty. Heart wrenched to a standstill, it can't even find the beautiful melody with which it joined hands at the opening of the movement. It fades from sight, lost in a deathly vale that echoes with strident searching blasts. Then, the first three notes of that theme emerge, only the first three steps, crying out, circling inward on themselves, seemingly entrapped, unable to take that fourth step outwards. Listen to this music. Listen 'in' to it - it's Franz's view out.

Do you wonder he didn't return to it? He had opened a window to his soul. He knew the corbie critics would preen themselves as they vied with each other, noting his aberrations from correct sonata form? But he was a genius - don't try to persuade me that he wasn't aware how exceptional this music was. Maybe he started the scherzo in good faith - but, having nearly finished it, he saw the awful truth - whatever he wrote detracted from what had gone before. Would he want to return to this self-revealing music? Like Sibelius struggling with his eighth symphony, he himself had set the bar too high. Or would he want to risk those jaded menuetting musos tramping all over it, clock-watching to catch the pub before closing? He wanted to pull that window shut. I say he was glad to let it disappear into a friend's junk pile - an irritating self seeking 'friend', deaf and blind to its value.

The mood lifts a little in the second movement. We catch a glimpse of serene beauty. Sir Donald Tovey, a great performer and academic (well able to finish Bach's fugue) founded and conducted the Reid Orchestra in Edinburgh. The second subject of this second movement, first on the clarinet, then the oboe, is introduced by an ethereal violin arc and then a gently rocking accompaniment. At that point, whenever Tovey was conducting it, his lower lip would begin to quiver, and then, as the clarinet started, the tears would flow - each and every time, rehearsal and performance. He didn't get that from the 'Teach yourself conducting' book. John McInulty, the principal cellist when I joined, related this to me. That anecdote, muttered to me while some conductor was searching for a good gesture, inspired me more than all Tovey's famous essays on musical analysis (and I had read them all).

The Unfinished rarely makes it out of the first half of the programme onto the elevated stage of the second half......the audience has to be given good money's worth out of a concert. Is this how we should treat this music? When I'm a famous impresario, I'll present the Unfinished in its two movement form (that's complete - not in any four movement aberration) as the only piece in the concert - and charge you double. ........and maybe I'll just stop at that silence.....

These are a few signposts that have caught my eye. This is a miraculous symphony. Actually, God listens to it on his iPod when he wants to chill out. He doesn't hanker after a happy clappy ending - he knows better. It would have been so easy for Schubert to 'finish' the symphony in the way we say he might have done - but he didn't. That's the point - he didn't. Does this suggest a simpler explanation of the enigma? Isn't the obvious answer that he didn't want to? Incidentally, the second subject of the first movement of his quintet in C (played by the two cellos) is one of the most sublime moments in all music - many have said this is what they want to hear as they die. I have visions of hundreds of musicians arriving at the pearly gates, and with this melody ringing out, Saint Peter says, "OK, it's the Schubert again, you can let this one in". God casts a knowing, wry smile at the folk arguing about how things should be finished. God does enigmas like we do crosswords.