The fingertips of his left hand, the one without the baton, moves to his lips in the universal signal for "quietly."

"Shuusssh," Jorge Mester says softly to someone — or a bunch of someones — a few rows back.

The conductor's arms move lazily now.

Here, in the middle of it all, the sound of the Beethoven's 9th Symphony is giant, dizzying, a 20-foot wave of loud and soft, leathery and tender, of stately, playful and noble.

And Mester, who became music director of the Naples Philharmonic Orchestra in 2004, somehow manages to pluck his vision of one of Beethoven's most emblematic works from this torrent of golden sound.

The music is slow now and Mester drops into a half-crouch, arms still extended like some kind of forklift. It means, I guess, another dip in sound. From flapping hands (hurry up) to wide-eyed surprise (tenderness) to squinting eyes and pursed lips (yearning) to the jab of the baton into the loose fist of the other hand (emphasis), conductors must mine our collective conscious for non-verbal cues capable of conveying his mental map of a work.

He straightens, his short-sleeve shirt and khakis slipping back into place. His arms fall to his sides and the orchestra tumbles to a stop — with a player here and there pushing hurriedly into the next musical phrase. Forty of the 48 there make up the fulltime core of the orchestra, which has a budget of $6.7 million.

"The downbeat of 753 should be an accent and not a diminuendo says the small man from low rise of the podium. Mester is talking about the measure number of the phrase.

As Mester will throughout the two-hour rehearsal, he sings the passage the way he hears it in his head.

Da da di deee dada dum.

Players nod. They get the code, that telegraphic language that is a microcosm of the job of the conductor itself.

Even some musicians don't understand what a conductor does, says Mester, 70. "Sometimes they ask me for lessons." He laughs. "It's a very interesting thing really because conducting technique, if it really works well, is too subtle for people to understand the effect it's having. To the extent that the orchestra plays well or badly is how it's reflected."

Unlike the orchestra world itself, the job of leading an orchestra has changed a lot in the past 10 or 20 years. Here we deconstruct a complex job that can cull seven-figure salaries, but increasing requires its disciples to be teachers and administrators, marketers, fund-raisers, money crunchers, psychologists, public speakers and live-in-the-community celebrities.

Augusta Symphony conductor Donald Portnoy has seen more than a thousand of conductors come through his international conductor's institute in South Carolina, Romania and Argentina. He characterizes the job simply: "Someone once said that even God would have a hard time with it."

The Basics

Preparation is key.

"You have to know what every instrument is doing," Portnoy says. "You have to have a concept of where you want the music to go, the tempo, the articulation and the balance — the whole ball of wax — to make this piece come across, to come alive to an audience. And the less talk you can do (during rehearsal) the better off you are."

But conductors are divided on how closely to follow the printed score. Some, like Naples resident conductor Clotilde Ortanto, strive to find and recreate the work the composer heard when writing it. "We're just a vessel," she says emphatically, "for the composer's vision."

"One of the challenges," says Mester, "is do you get the character of the piece from the tempo markings or do you ascribe a tempo to what you have decided is the character of the piece?"

He remembers working on one of composer Paul Hindemith's operas. He followed Hindemith's markings to the letter.

"I performed the piece for him," says Mester, who, during his 12 years as music director of the Louisville Symphony Orchestra, recorded 72 albums of contemporary music. "He said it was very nice but the tempos were wrong."

"That's basically the dilemma we all have. To what extent to go with the printed page. That's what makes it exciting to be a performer and daunting as well."

Most music directors have multiple gigs, juggling appointments with more than one orchestra as well as teaching and guest conducting.

James Levine, for instance, famously conducts both the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as well as appearing as guest conductor throughout the world. In addition to his tenure as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim was named chief conductor for life with the Staatskapelle Berlin.

Although the phenomenon is common in The Bigs, the arrangement proves most fortuitous for orchestras in smaller markets or those with less muscular budgets. For instance, hiring a music director of Jorge Mester's reknown and experience is a coup for any community, but especially for one of Naples' size. Mester, in fact, shares his time with the Pasadena Symphony, an orchestra with a modest $2.5 million budget that he has directed for 20 years. He lives full-time in Montrose, Calif.

Resident conductor Clotilde Ortanto, who sometimes conducts the New York Ballet, has lived in Naples since 1999. "I like to be part of the community," says Ortanto, who founded the Philharmonic Youth Orchestra five years ago. "I have friends here. I go to many social occasions. I run on the beach and people stop me and they tell me what they like."

Salaries of music directors can be impressive.

In a 2004 story for The New York Times, Blair Tindall reported that of the 18 American orchestras with 52-week contracts, at least seven pay their music directors more than $1 million. At the top of the heap: The New York Philharmonic paid music director Lorin Maazel $2.28 million for 14 weeks and an annual tour.

Philharmonic executive director Myra Janco Daniels refused to reveal Jorge Mester's exact salary, although she allowed that the roughly 13-week annual contract is in the "neighborhood of a quarter-of-a-million dollars, plus benefits." The orchestra paid Ortanto $83,500 plus $7,023 in benefits in 2003-04, the most recent tax records available. By law, federally tax exempt non-profits with incomes of more than $25,000 must make their tax returns available upon request.

Conductors generally start out as musicians.

Many — including Leonard Bernstein, Christoph Eschenbach and Mikhail Pletnev — on piano. James Levine was trained in both piano and violin. Lorin Maazel, Marin Alsop and Mester on the violin. Harold Faberman and Neeme Jarvi on percussion.

The Looney Tunes conductor need not apply.

"That's a thing of the past," says Philharmonic principal timpanist John Evans.

Mester laughs when you ask about it. "I was once called by an agency in L.A. to audition for a commercial for Mercedes," he says. "They were going to pay me $40,000. I was supposed to stand in front of an orchestra and say, 'I demand perfection.' I couldn't say it. So they hired some actor who looks like a conductor." He laughs again. "Nobody wants to play with that, and more and more musicians have a say about who they work with."

Female conductors, once unheard of, are on the rise.

Although women lead philharmonics across the country, it wasn't until last year that one was appointed as music director of a major orchestra. It didn't go over well: Musicians initially clashed with management over Marin Alsop's contract with the Baltimore Symphony. She becomes the full-time music director in September 2007.

"It's a new art for women and it's very hard," says Ortanto, who has been friends with Alsop for years. "One of my teachers used to say that, as a woman, you have to work double. You have to prove what you're doing, prove what you're doing all the time. But I bet in 100 years, women conductors will be common."

Why has it taken so long? asks Alex Ross, the New Yorker writer. "Partly it's sexism, of course, but it's also the inherent conservatism of the orchestra as an institution. Players don't like change and innovation, and, alas, a woman on the podium is an innovation."

The classical program of the future could look very different.

Even 30 years ago, the preconcert lecture didn't exist. Today, this means of humanizing the music director and demystifying the music is common, almost a necessity.

Clotilde Ortanto takes it one step further, and speaks to the audience in between pieces. It's a move that's relatively rare: Most conductors still don't feel comfortable breaking the mental and psychological distance between the stage and the seats.

Other orchestras, like the New York Philharmonic, have innovative programs designed to help audiences connect with music, especially new music. "Here & Now" puts together an emcee and the composer of the work performed, and the audience can ask questions.

Others have offered short happy-hour concerts designed to appeal to the young professional on the go, as well as speed dating and tango lessons, before events and at intermission.

Conductors will likely remain careful about the mix of new and old, presenting a little of the familiar with the less familiar and perhaps more challenging. Earlier this season, Mester paired pieces by 19th-century-composers Felix Mendelssohn and Max Bruch with 20th century composer John Adams's "The Chairman Dances."

"You know, I'm convincing the members of the audience who might be slightly timorous that they're not going to hear any music that's not exciting and beautiful," Mester says.

Of course, not everything comes across. Then, he says, the coughing ensues. "You can tell they're bored when they start hacking away. You can't win them all, is what you say to yourself. You can't give in to despair."

The Big Picture

At its core, conducting is a straightforward pursuit. Pick your programming. Research as needed. Process the score through your own intuition and training. Take all that accumulated understanding to the orchestra. Rehearse. Perform. Repeat.

Verdi wouldn't have done it much differently. Budgets are often tighter now, cutting down on the number of rehearsals most orchestras can afford to do even 20 years ago. And planning stretches two or three years out. Yet most conductors are still men. Most wear tuxes at concerts. Most don't speak to the audience during concerts. Almost all perform with their back to the audience.

"The art form of the symphony concert, in the most standard form, would not have surprised Brahms," says Henry Fogel, the president and CEO of the American Symphony Orchestra League since 2003. For 18 years before that, he managed the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. "It's something that more and more of us are discussing in the field: How we have to change it without dumbing it down."

But as the art comfortably treads water, the principle conductor of most orchestras has taken on an expanded role as music director, which includes working with the realities of arts non-profits; charming your audience while surreptitiously educating them; fund-raising with verve, creating new bridges to the audience and, increasingly, living in the community as the face of the orchestra and a walking billboard for the orchestra's subscription series.

And with many of the nation's top orchestras — from Detroit to Boulder to Chicago — looking for a new music director, those demands shape who audiences see on the podium in the coming years.

Self selection, Henry Fogel calls it. "These qualities more and more are being added to the search."

"I've seen this in terms of the orchestra expecting the music director making some kind of connection in the community," he goes on. "Something that ... is more and more about removing the distance, the mystique around the music director, making more of a human connection both in the concert hall and more and more in the community."

Fogel mentions Michael Christie, the new music director of the Phoenix Symphony. "The first concert (of his) I saw last fall, up until about 20 minutes before the concert, he was standing in the plaza welcoming the patrons."

But there are downsides to being everything to everyone.

"Unfortunately, some of those roles have intruded on the original role of commanding great performances" says Alex Ross, a critic and writer for The New Yorker. "The job has been professionalized to an extent that we now have conductor 'experts' flying in and out, applying their precise skills and moving on. Brilliant performances without emotional depth are the result.

"We really need to have conductors more immersed in the lives of their orchestras, month in and month out — enough with the 12-week stint, which is more or less like a bunch of guest-conducting gigs strung together."

The Question No One Asks Out Loud

What is the conductor doing with that baton?

Clotilde Ortanto laughs when I ask. "Actually, conducting is showing the music through body language," says Ortanto, who seriously studied dance until she was 17, when a back problem ended her dreams of dancing. "So it's not only the baton. But the baton shows the tempo, the rhythm, the articulation. It shows the dynamics, the phrasing and the style. All kinds of musical details.

"But the eyes are very important. The great conductor shows the eyes."

The Bottom Line

"You have to be an inspiring leader," Mester says. "That goes without saying. That's because the musicians who play in the orchestra are those who have honed their skills over decades to be the best possible musician and player and, by having done that, they've had the opportunity to build up extremely strong views. You get 100 (musicians) on the stage and the conductor has to convince them to give up the notion and buy into your vision."

Which often means a modern conductor has to become part-detective, part-psychologist. "If something doesn't sound like you think it's going to, the way happens in your head, you have to figure out why the musicians didn't produce it," Mester says. "And it's the way you explain the thing. That was too fast, or you can also say, could you go slightly slowly? You learn how to manage language to bring out the desire ... to be a part of the vision."

Music director Donald Portnoy adds: "What is the bottomline purpose of the conductor is to excite the player to give the total utmost. Everyone from an amateur to a professional want to do well and will give you 75 percent without your asking. The extra 25 percent you have to earn."

And that energy and enthusiasm, many say, sells tickets as well.

"You have to be interesting," Portnoy says. "When people walk into the concert hall, people don't close their eyes. The looking enhances the listening. You hear the gorgeous sound. You look at the conductor and he or she doesn't look dull, doesn't seem to be interested. You look at the player and, of course, they don't look interested either. You ask yourself, how can I be excited about the music if they're not interested?"

In the end, a great conductor simply has to do it all, says Glenn Basham, concertmaster for the Naples orchestra.

"The thing about art is it ostensibly about life," he says. "A really great conductor has to be a great person, has to inspire, educate and excite people, be incredibly talented, a fantastic public-relations person and a great fund-raiser.

"These days a modern conductor is really expected to change culture."