Do Current Conductors Measure Up To The Greats Of The Past?

[Bryn]

- I saw (and heard) her conduct the Hallé in Leeds Town Hall last year in Beethoven #4 and the Brahms d minor Piano Concerto and was ... bowled over!

Still, just, on the iPlayer is this edition of In Tune, with Karina Canellakis.

[Petrushka]

- I saw (and heard) her conduct the Hallé in Leeds Town Hall last year in Beethoven #4 and the Brahms d minor Piano Concerto and was ... bowled over!

So was I by the recent Prom. Wish I'd been there. For some reason I can't explain I was honestly put in mind of the young Karajan.

[jayne lee wilson]

Well, I look at my own shelves and see acres of Karajan, Klemperer, Solti, Kubelik etc, etc. Over the past few years I've been taking huge advantage of the big box re-issues of the back catalogue - and have no regrets whatever.

I was amazingly lucky to have started my concert-going in 1972 (I was nearly 18) when Rudolf Kempe was the first conductor I saw and I soon went on to attend London concerts. The 1970s & 1980s were a true golden age, the big names of the podium appearing night after night at the RFH, never mind the Proms. In the space of just one month 40 years ago (Feb/March 1978) I met Messiaen (in Manchester), saw Haitink (twice), Solti, Boskovsky and Abbado. It was unbelievable and I was travelling around everywhere. Of the 'great' names on Beefy's list I saw three and met two of them (Böhm and Bernstein)

Recordings don't even tell half the story. When you've seen Karajan conduct Bruckner, Kempe conduct Strauss, Bernstein conduct Mahler you really do know that nothing will ever truly, truly compare however good.

Yes, but many of us never had the opportunity to get to many concerts, as financial, geographical, then later, health and other restrictions or commitments prevented us still further....whose Classical Music Culture only existed because of recordings, Radio 3, Gramophone.... and we end up wondering why those who worship at the feet of the official Great Conductors (whose relative merits I never deny, and have sought to understand through hours of close listening) too often ignore those later artists who offer new insights(**), Manze and Venzago among them, not least into those very Brahms and Bruckner Symphonies for so long the guarded preserve of those Gods of the Podium and the Golden Age of Stereo....self-evidently to the music's longer-term, crystallising, museological detriment.
(**which sometimes turn out to be forgotten, marginalised, older insights: vide the relation between Venzago and Volkmar Andreae in Bruckner).

My deepest affections are for 20th Century music, specifically mid-century figures like Roussel, Honegger, Gerhard, Skalkottas, Martinu, Enescu.... without recordings (and to some degree broadcasts & webcasts) I'd scarcely have known of their existence, never mind coming to love them, carry them in my head and heart. That's even truer of later music like Ligeti, Lutosławski, Max Davies, David Matthews etc...

If "recordings don't even tell half the story" have I been wasting my time since, oh, about 1972? Maybe I should have stuck to Rock and Pop after all...

[jayne lee wilson]

Well, you might "know" this, Pet - but speaking as someone bowled over by Karajan's Brahms #1, Bernstein's Mahler #9, and Tennstedt's Mahler #6 (etc, etc, etc) I get far greater comfort than your comment offers from the knowledge that Brahms # 1 is greater than Karajan or any of its performers (and, likewise Mahler for Bernstein and Tennstedt) and that those works are going to keep offering new generations of performers the opportunity to bowl me over afresh.

Yes - such as Venzago's recent release of Brahms Symphonies & Serenades (especially his extraordinary, utterly radical 1st Symphony!), and Manze's just a few years back... but how many listeners here actually pay close attention to them? (Except, like too many reviewers, to mark them down against their own established inner models...)

I keep thinking of The Brandenburg Project, (Prom 29/30, Sunday August 5) and of how few listeners here bothered to attend to it or comment... it took up most of a Sunday (devotional in the best non-denominational sense!) with its marvellous interleaving of vivacious, freshly read presentations of the most familiar classical masterpieces with contemporary inspirations taking wing from them, none of which anyone would have heard before......

(It was an extraordinary experience for me - sonically, emotionally, spiritually; I didn't need to go to a concert hall to get it.)

Why was this a thrilling, unpredictable, spontaneous prospect to so few? Why was it not more popular here?

[Petrushka]

If "recordings don't even tell half the story" have I been wasting my time since, oh, about 1972? Maybe I should have stuck to Rock and Pop after all...

I should have made it clearer that I meant recordings versus the live experience which was something very different. I was lucky that I managed to get to so many concerts when I was so much younger before the geographical, financial and health issues mattered.

[LMcD]

Among present-day conductors, I rate Mariss Jansons particularly highly.

[rauschwerk]

Once upon a time, a conductor's greatness was measured by his (yes, always his) mastery of the German classics. That is to say, he needed to show mastery in music by two or more of (say) Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler. A good many conductors were regarded as second-rank because they preferred to plough other furrows. Stokowski (surely one of the greats) was one such. He conducted huge amounts of contemporary music and was much admired by Klemperer, perhaps because of his tireless promotion of the music of Schoenberg. How many of the 'greats' would even have considered giving the first performance of Ives's 4th at the age of 80?

Nowadays, I believe, we assess conductors on much broader repertoire and so much the better for them and us.

[BBMmk2]

Like JLW, I have restrictions, due to health reasons, as to going to concerts is concerned. But conductors today I think are Haitink, Jansons, Rattle, Chailly. To name four.

[Richard Tarleton]

geographical

Geography was responsible for a sizeable gap in my orchestral concert-going career during which I managed to miss (for example) Tennstedt altogether. Thankfully the likes of Haitink and Davis were still very much around when it resumed. In an intense period in the early and mid 70s I caught a good few of the "greats", so many of whose names began with K . Best dressed conductors I ever saw - a photo finish between Carlo Maria Giulini and Lorin Maazel .

[gradus]

I'd add Constantin Silvestri to the smooth dressers list.

[edashtav]

I'd add Constantin Silvestri to the smooth dressers list.

Constantin’s massive bearskin coat was a shaggy dog’s story.

[Richard Barrett]

I imagine a lot of the people who'd say current conductors don't measure up to the greats of the past would say the same about composers.

[BBMmk2]

I imagine a lot of the people who'd say current conductors don't measure up to the greats of the past would say the same about composers.

I had thought of that as well. I think there's been some very good contemporary music at the Proms this year. Especially last night's Prom, the Philip Venables.

[Petrushka]

I imagine a lot of the people who'd say current conductors don't measure up to the greats of the past would say the same about composers.

A glance at my own shelves would disprove that theory! Nestling amongst the acres of Karajan, Bernstein, Böhm, etc you will find Henze, Rihm, Turnage, Neuwirth, Ligeti, Boulez and - yes - Barrett!

[cloughie]

I imagine a lot of the people who'd say current conductors don't measure up to the greats of the past would say the same about composers.

I think that is a difficult to answer, and not because of the quality of product of modern composers. How can you compare on the basis of a ‘one off’ listening of a new work heard at the proms with a work you are very familiar with, having listened to on record for a number of years. A new work has to really work hard to compete and will only get another listening if something hits the ‘that sounds good’ button! This applies, with me, for all genres of music jazz, pop wharever, it has to strike me as something more than noise, but then at my age my memory is full of music that I really like!