Orchestral musicians have been muttering “a robot could conduct better than that idiot” since the profession of conductor was invented, in the early 19th century. And now, it seems, they may be right.

Before hailing Asimo, Honda’s robot conductor, as the Toscanini of our age, I think we would need its technique and interpretative powers to be put through a sterner test than is provided by that cheesy Sixties ballad, The Impossible Dream. I think I could probably programme my toaster to conduct that.

But so far the evidence suggests that Asimo may have a glittering career in the world's concert halls ahead of him. After all, eye-witnesses in Detroit on Tuesday report that the orchestra started and finished together. Already that’s a vast improvement on some of the performances I have reviewed over the past 30 years.

What I find fascinating is how the role of the conductor is reinterpreted by each age. In the Victorian era the conductor was the epitome of the Romantic artist as demigod — treated with awe and reverence. After the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union attempted to abolish conductors altogether, instructing orchestras to rely on collective decision-making and socialist comradeship to get them through performances (an experiment that lasted for about three weeks of cacophonic anarchy).

In the age of the great dictators, conductors such as Otto Klemperer and George Szell were given licence to terrorise orchestras with vicious sarcasm and impossible demands. Whereas in the chilled-out Sixties, the leading conductors — as epitomised by Leonard Bernstein and Andre Previn — were laid-back, groovy dudes, as comfortable on a chat show as on the podium.

And our generation? Well, we have reinvented the conductor as a robot. How apt for an age that is increasingly replacing human-to-human communication with impersonal technological interfaces.

But is Asimo the finished article? Does he have an ego the size of Belgium? Does his agent demand that he gets a fee equivalent to the rest of the orchestra put together? And how many young sopranos has he seduced?

Until we know the answer to these vital artistic questions, we can’t really call him a true maestro.

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