Last August, I was invited to join the HICES Music Festival as a guest conductor. Every year, the Independent Co-Educational schools come together from across NSW and run a two-day music camp before a performance at the Sydney Town Hall. The majority of the 400 youngsters from Years 7 to 12 come from outside the metropolitan area and get the chance to become part of a bigger ensemble with more instruments than their own school could ever provide.

Photo © Yan Krukau/Pexels

I walked into the rehearsal room at Stanwell Tops, south of Sydney, and a small child asked, “Sir, can you put the D string on my violin?” I looked at him as if he had asked me to dance the pas de deux from The Nutcracker. I said, “Let’s find you a tutor for that.”

I had 70 players in my orchestra, and as I raised my baton for the first rehearsal of the March from the Karelia Suite by Sibelius, the cacophony of wrong notes and bad intonation made me realise that I might have wildly overestimated what...