As a bonafide orchestra wonk, I spend significant chunks of my day listening to the end products of guys wielding a stick in front of an assembly of fine musicians. Over time I've established relationships with conductors, forged in a lifetime of listening and often maintained despite said conductors being quite thoroughly posthumous. I'm by no means necrophiliac about it all, but given the century-plus-small-change that conductors have been practicing their craft before a microphone, it's a slam-dunk that we baton aficionados will be soaking up the achievements of careers that ended long ago. Dead conductors outnumber the living ones and the ratio steadily widens. That poses no particular problem for record collectors, since a conductor's recorded legacy is immortal. Allowing for technological deficiencies, media changes, and the vagaries of publishing schedules, the work of a conductor and his orchestra is likely to remain available indefinitely. Internet downloads both legal and dicey add yet another layer of possibility. Never before has conductor-collecting been so easy or so inexpensive.
Collectors might form passionate attachments to certain conductors while harboring smoldering vendettas against others. Discussions become screaming matches that rival the scorched-earth turf wars between opera queens and their pet divas. Viewed from one angle such red-hot scrums are funny. Viewed from another they provide depressing glimpses of the slimy underbelly of human nature. I remember being cut dead by a chap after I demurred from joining him in slashing Arturo Toscanini. Herbert von Karajan was described as a monster in a particularly vituperative article. Oh, dear.
Fortunately, while most collectors might show strong partiality for certain conductors and orchestras, few evince such uncompromising extremism. I am reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's quip about literary critics who, in their zeal to lambaste a particular novel, don a suit of armor and attack a hot fudge sundae. Equanimity is everything, even where one's choice of conductors is concerned. No musician is all one thing or another. People learn and grow and develop; people change; people form new opinions; people adapt to new situations.
I have my own little coterie of favorites. I may allow certain conductors only restricted air time, but I have never banished anyone from my listening room. I'm just too curious for that, too inquisitive and acquisitive about music and listening. I'm not uncritical by any means, but a vendetta- or romance-forming listener I am not. A few observations are in order about the conductors who make up my inner circle.
Antál Dorati
Dorati won my heart early on with his warm, musicianly set of the complete Haydn symphonies with the Philharmonia Hungarica. Add to that his superb stewardship of the major Haydn operas and my bliss is complete. It wasn't until later that I began to discover Dorati's many achievements beyond Haydn, in particular his winning work with the Minneapolis and London bands for Mercury Living Presence. Dorati remains my A-Numbah-One man for The Rite of Spring as well as Bartók's orchestral works. He tends to take fast tempi that can edge into a take-no-prisoners approach, but rarely does he ever slop over into harshness or hysteria. Every once in a while I find a Dorati performance disappointing, such as his Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 with Minneapolis; that one suffers from a rather tepid finale. Most of the time he nails it bang-on and dead center. If you're not familiar with Dorati's work, may I suggest his picture-perfect Tchaikovsky "Little Russian" symphony with the LSO for Mercury Living Presence as an introduction?
Iván Fischer
Just when you thought the era of longterm conductor-orchestra symbiosis was over, along comes Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Thoughtful, courageous, and imaginative, Fischer stands staunchly apart from the marching columns of cookie-cutter conductors who all seem to be using the same taste-tested and Mom-approved recipes, none of them particularly distinguished but none particularly objectionable either. For a recent Beethoven Pastorale Fischer experimented with threading the placement of his wind instruments throughout the orchestra, with fascinating results. In partnership with his honed Budapest ensemble, Fischer created a Dvorak 7th that to my mind solves the slightly problematic finale with flying colors, providing a highly dramatic ending that perfectly balances tension with relaxation, heroism with lyricism, simplicity with grandeur. It seems that about once a year Fischer & Co. bring out another Channel Classics jewel. Once it was a glorious Brahms First coupled with my all-time favorite Brahms Haydn Variations; the next year Beethoven 4th and 6th. Recent releases include a Sacre that steers clear of undue stridency or hysteria while giving the sonic goods in spaces, an exquisitely rich Schubert 9th, and that incredible Dvorak 7th. I never miss a Fischer/Budapest release. They're that good.
Herbert Blomstedt
HB: world-class master conductor, sterling musician, superb orchestral builder. He ranks easily with the finest of them all. So why are so few people aware of that? Perhaps it's his quiet demeanor both on and off stage. He is an undemonstrative podium figure and a quiet-living man. His decade in San Francisco was distinguished by lasting orchestral growth and an association with Decca that produced sixty some-odd recordings of uncommon brilliance. I can't tell you how many HB/SFS discs rank among my very favorites for their repertory—Sibelius symphonies, Hindemith orchestral works, Mendelssohn "Italian" and "Scottish" symphonies, Richard Strauss Alpine Symphony, Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, and more. Blomstedt's compassionate traversal of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll with a luminous SFS is to me the gold standard for an elusive and rarely well-played work. Blomstedt is one of our great Brucknerians, an ardent advocate for the Nielsen symphonies, and a truly distinguished Brahmsian. Just to add to the luster, Blomstedt has also recorded with his European orchestras, no less than the Dresden Staatskapelle and the Leipzig Gewandhaus. You don't listen to Blomstedt for flash. You listen to Blomstedt for the music. Oh, he has his detractors. But I'm not one of them.
Carlo Maria Giulini
A theme is emerging as I progress. Obviously I'm no fan of podium hotshots. I value the artists who aim for the heart of the music, who focus on orchestral tone, persuasive architecture, and an emotional temperature appropriate to the moment. Given that, there's no way in hell Giulini wouldn't be on my little list. What a servant of the art the man was! He could blaze when necessary, but most of the time he eschewed extremes. A Giulini performance, whether with the LA Phil or Chicago Symphony or Vienna Philharmonic, can be recognized by a lack of histrionics, by long flowing melodic lines, and by a sense of rightness and inevitability. Therefore he was at his absolute Olympian best in the grand works of the Austro-German repertory, Brahms in particular. Giulini's late Brahms cycle in Vienna is a thing of wonder, each of those four magisterial symphonies sculpted and shaped with absolute certainty, the Vienna Philharmonic at its most radiant.
Pierre Monteux
It's inevitable that I would be tight with Maître Pierre, given the many years I have spent absorbing his plethora of recordings both live and canned from his 17-year stint here in San Francisco. But I would have treasured him anyway. Monteux was in so many ways the ideal conductor, at home with a vast range of repertory and in absolute, albeit relaxed, control of his orchestras. For the legendary Ballet Russes he conducted the premieres of Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Daphnis et Chloë. Then came his long term in San Francisco, a fine period in Boston, and finally a lifetime appointment at age 86 as the director of the London Symphony Orchestra. The man left us an astonishing variety of recordings that span the musical gamut from Bach through stuff so new the ink wasn't yet dry. Monteux's style was direct and uncluttered, his tempi typically fast, his preferred orchestral tone transparent. As he aged he slowed down, but even in his autumnal days he could grace us with a downright radiant Elgar Enigma Variations in London. His San Francisco recordings are shackled by technical limitations, but no audio shortcomings can mask the authority with which he shepherds the SFS through the Brahms 2nd Symphony, in either 1945 on 78s or a 1951 outing on magnetic tape and LPs. In Boston he produced one of the all-time great Tchaikovsky Pathétiques, in Chicago the Franck D Minor Symphony to end all Franck D Minor Symphonies. He was a giant, pure and simple, a French conductor who excelled in Wagner and Brahms and Beethoven in addition to the usual crew of French composers from Berlioz to d'Indy. Maybe he belongs to an older world when conductors were less concerned about the niggling details as long as the musical message came across. So Monteux allowed a loud trumpet blat in Ravel's La valse and tolerated a shaky horn solo in the slow movement of the Franck symphony. No matter. He made music, music, and more music. His San Francisco records might have been made over phone lines, but he never phoned in a performance.
Charles Munch
Munch reminds me of Monteux in a lot of ways. Undemonstrative and musicianly, he always turned out carefully balanced and beautifully tailored performances. Over his long tenure he ensured that Koussevitzky's immaculately well-honed Boston Symphony remained securely at the forefront of the world's orchestras. Munch always seemed to "get" every piece, helped immeasurably I'm sure by the supreme musicianship of those folks on stage. He was a patrician at the head of an orchestra of aristocrats. It didn't hurt any that he made the bulk of his recordings for RCA back in those halcyon days when orchestral balance was up to the conductor and not a bunch of engineers twiddling sliders and shoving microphones around. Munch at his absolute top form: that incredible Ravel Daphnis et Chloë from the late 1950s, an audio blockbuster to this day and still capable of raising pimples on every goose in the vicinity.
Mariss Jansons
I'm not sure if it's Jansons that I treasure as much as his main band, that astonishing music machine in Amsterdam. RCO Live recordings perfectly capture the wet slap of the Concertgebouw, all that juicy and ripe music-making emanating from a gloriously plush ensemble. But I can also attest to Jansons with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic and a set of the Rachmaninoff symphonies that never fails to astound me. Watching him conduct via the DVD of Shostakovich's Lady MacBeth reveals that he is a facial leader, one whose many expressions speak as much to the orchestra as does his stick technique.
Others and Also-Rans
Of course these aren't my only faves. I dig William Steinberg, Otto Klemperer, André Previn, Michael Tilson Thomas, Vernon Handley, Adrian Boult, Riccardo Chailly, Claudio Abbado, Carlos Kleiber, Istvan Kertesz, Rafael Kubelik. I'm not much of a George Szell fan; his Mozart performances display a gentle side all too often missing in the slashing perfectionism of his Cleveland recordings. Ditto Fritz Reiner; while I admire his extraordinary achievements in Chicago, too often those wonderful players sound driven. A Rossini Overtures disc is almost heartbreaking in the way those effervescent confections are bitch-slapped, frog-marched, and regimented into submission. I'll grant that Reiner has his moments—his Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta remains an absolute gold standard both musically and sonically. But he's rarely among my prime choices.
Leopold Stokowski: fascinating, wonderful, sometimes irritating, always compelling. Grand masters Toscanini, Furtwängler, von Karajan—I'm always ready for 'em. Oldies but goodies along the lines of Alfred Hertz, Willem Mengelberg, Victor de Sabata, Felix Weingartner are always welcome Chez Moi.
And what about Leonard Bernstein? I blow hot and cold there. Sometimes Lenny really delivered. Sometimes he was on autopilot. Sometimes Lenny pushed the composer out of the way. Those glassy 1960s Columbia recordings didn't help matters much, given the New York Philharmonic's tendency towards stridency. Still, Bernstein was nobody's fool and a musician to respect, admire, and celebrate. Nonetheless, I approach any Bernstein recording warily, never sure what to expect.