“Hello hello,” he said as he walked through the door. Hardly slowing his fast gait, he pulled off his winter coat and hat as he passed us, running a hand quickly through his fluffy black hair. “Hi!” we called after him, but he had already ducked through the door in the huge white shell and was halfway to the podium. Maestro Randall Craig Fleischer, known to most simply as “Randy,” placed a baton on the music stand and sat down on the podium to make a few pre-rehearsal notes in the score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

There are all sorts of conductors — loud ones, quiet ones, brilliant ones, mediocre ones; some are vain, or humble, friendly, or distant. From his emphasis on efficiency and punctuality to his careful attention to the duration of a sixteenth note in the second movement, this conductor is On Time. He is big city fast pace, skillful technique, brilliant musicality.

Randy glanced down at a digital clock the size of a dinner plate that sat on a music stand beside his podium. A rehearsal costs approximately thirty dollars a minute in salary for the orchestra alone, and a good conductor does not waste a moment. At precisely 7:15 pm, Randy silenced the chorus’s chattering and the orchestra’s practicing with a single outstretched hand, and rehearsal began. “Good evening everybody,” he said, his clear voice echoing out over the hall. “I’d like to start in movement four, then on to the scherzo, then movements one and three; get through everything tonight in bits and pieces.” He spoke fast, but I did not miss a word. “Measure 208 of the finale, please.” His downbeat was as clear as his speech; his baton described polygons as well-articulated as his syllables. The dramatic entrance of the chorus’s Ode to Joy echoed in the empty hall. One two, one two, staccato, slur, the wave of voices washing over me.

Then suddenly, the torrent of sound was cut off in the middle. “No! No! No! No! No!” he cried. The chorus was silent. Someone giggled. “We play B-flat there! You don’t sing there! It was going so well until then!” he said, remorsefully, though not without a touch of humor. “Pickup to the adagio!” They played again, sailing past the offending B-flat without incident. They rehearsed an earlier passage then. “Write it in blood if you have to,” he exclaimed to the cellos. “Exactly in tempo! Don’t rush.” They smiled meekly before jumping into the fast forte passage again. “Fine fine fine. Letter K please.”

The single word that describes his manner is zillasecond, a word coined I believe by the conductor himself, or at least frequently employed by him. “You’re tending to rush that section,” Randy said to the violins after a passage at the beginning of the movement. “You’re hanging on to the sforzando a zillasecond too long; play exactly in tempo!” His ability to combine efficiency and precision with great excitement and passion is striking. He can listen to the orchestra and hear if they are rushing, or dragging, if only by a single zillasecond.

A symphony does not exist in exact tempo, however; rubato, phrasing, a fermata here and there, all are crucial to the music. Here, Randy uses the zillasecond not to define the length of a note, but to give himself complete freedom, asking that the orchestra watch and follow. “I’m going to take just a zillasecond longer in this phrase,” he says, baton hanging in the air and suspending time itself before dropping softly back to the steady three.

The finale built to a stunning fortissimo. Growing increasingly energetic, Randy jumped into the air one, two, three, four times in quick succession, a good four inches off the podium, yet exactly in time with the beat. He shook his head in time with the timpani rolls, and his hair fluttered. He became the physical embodiment of the music. The symphony came to a dramatic close, and five or six chorus members shouted in delight. “Whoo! Yeah!” they cried. I wanted to applaud, but I was silent. Randy held up his hand to silence the chorus members. The rehearsal was far from over and the ending far from perfect, but the conductor smiled as he flipped through the score to the next passage.

At the performance tomorrow night, 180 people onstage and 2,000 in the audience will follow his baton, the nod of his head, the gesture of his hand, and he will lift them up to a magical stratosphere of sound. Orchestra and conductor will share the risk; one moment he will show them the way, and they will be safe. The next moment, they will realize they are soaring with nothing holding them in the air, but they are not afraid, though it is a long way to fall. Drama, passion, glory, love, all exist in the space of a zillasecond — an instant or an eternity.

Suddenly Randy dropped his hand and set his baton on the music stand. The orchestra stopped mid-measure. “Good night ladies and gentlemen,” he said. The musicians rose and packed up their instruments. My watch read 9:58. I reset it to 10:00. q