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Originally Posted by trent1280
Those entranced by the eloquent genius of Carlos Kleiber will enjoy BBC Radio 3 on Saturday 26 September. Starting at 12:15 pm, GMT, they are transmitting a major documentary on the life and art of this peerless conductor.
Interviewees include Placido Domingo, Sir Peter Jonas, and Dr Charles Barber. The latter carried on a correspondence with Kleiber from 1989 to the end, studying score and poetry and much more. Anyone who actually knew Kleiber bluntly dismisses nonsense about his alleged craziness.
According to Barber, "Anyone who thinks that Kleiber was some sort of Howard Hughes minus the long hair and fingernails simply never knew the man. He was profoundly generous, funny, aware, and sensitive. Foolish gossip notwithstanding, he was the greatest of us all."
Ask professional conductors of standing, and they will uniformly tell you of their admiration for Carlos Kleiber. No wonder.
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Thanks very much for making me aware of that; I'll definitely listen to it. And in case you defended Kleiber in the wake of my 'eccentric' remark, let me just clarify that I hold him in the highest regard, above all other conductors. Eccentricity is a favourable quality, and it tends to go hand in hand with genius - though the information is new to me, I am not surprised that he is described as profoundly generous, funny, aware, and sensitive.
With regards to his position amongst the best conductors to have lived, I would certainly place him above Karajan without a doubt. Karajan, to me, is detrimentally mechanistic. We are all aware of proverbs about machines never being able to fulfil a genius' job; while I wouldn't insult Karajan so much as that, I would say that he is the perfect machine - the genius machine. If there were a machine that
could emulate human genius, then it was him. It places him higher than a lot of well-respected conductors, but his interpretations nevertheless fall short of someone as great as Kleiber.