Thread: mature conductors?

I'M a total rookie that started liked classical music 1 year ago, what does a mature conductor mean? im new in this, does it mean that all young conductors make like 100 errors per piece? how do you measure what performance of a piece was the best? how do you know if a conductor is better than anyone? i ask this because i don't know what experts know about classical music, i started liking it 1 year ago

(and because i watched lots of videos from bernstein and karajan, and didnt understand why they could be better than others in the same pieces)

Meh. Young conductors... well, these are rare creatures. Noone start learning conducting in age typical for instrumental beginners, that is: 7-12 years old. Most of conducting students are already trained in some instrument and go for conducting while being 20 or so. So they start to perform professionally while they are not so young, that means after 26 or so.

And before they are well-known and make recordings/perform with renoved orchestras and solists they usually are in late 30's.

I can hardly remember hearing young conductor. I once seen video with "young Karajan" and then I've found out that he was reaching 40 in that time.

So youth is relative thing when it comes to conductors.

(and because i watched lots of videos from bernstein and karajan, and didnt understand why they could be better than others in the same pieces)

You should already work it out if you're into classical for one year. If not, well, then keep on comparing various performances of your favourite works and you will see that Karajan is better than others in the same pieces because he has perfect shape of forehead.

Many of the most famous conductors have had remarkably long careers, possibly because the physical exertion of conduction seems to be very good aerobic exercize.
Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977), conducted his last concert at the age of 90 and continued to make recordings after that until he died !
Lorin Maazel, former music director of the New York Philharmonic,just turned 80 and is still active all over the world, and has just been appointed music director of the Munich Philharmonic!
Pierre Monteux, Otto Klemperer, Sir Adrian Boult, Eugene Ormandy, Gunter Wand, Kurt Sanderling, Arturo Toscanini, and other conductors all lived to ripe old ages and were active conducting up to their 80s.

i wonder how much would a conductor improve in 40 years, maybe around 10 to 20% of his capacity? or more? or less? (just to measure it somehow...) because i know a conductor from this country, he is 30 years old they say that he's great but has to mature (so i guess he and lots of conductors (especially young) make lots of errors when conducting) and i don't know anything about that word to mature in music, to me his performances sound beautiful and interesting, like almost all the performances (of the pieces i like) but i was watching a clip of karajan beethoven 9 and i didn't like how he reduced the volume suddenly in the middle of a compact part of a piece and not in the beggining of it, and other things like that, my preference was the lorin maazel performance (or valery gergiev's, i don't really remember the name but it was 1 of those 2), and the same happened to me in a lot more than 1 other pieces... and i said, well... for sure he, karajan might be the best ever but my conclusion is that the difference seems to be the main set of instruments that the orchesta has (some flutes for example sound better than other flutes in other orchestras, and i don't guess the conductor has to do a lot in that, i even strongly suspect that if the orchestra of this country exchanged the instruments of the berlin phil, they would sound amazing, and the others just ok)
anyways i have strange tastes maybe, i wish that i could learn music deeply but i cant i have another job and practice a sport, hahaha

i see, the musical depht was a lot more important than errors then, although for now for me the most important thing is if i like them or not, and i'll just for fun do a variable ranking of my clips, conductors and orchestras, maybe i'll find interesting conclusions, although with the absence of help of musical theory, just maybe

Anyone heard of Robin Ticciati? Born 1983, British conductor.

I never heard of him until last week.

I suppose anyone can conduct but whether one's good at it is another story.

But by "mature" conductors, I initially thought the white hair or bald old geezer variety, who probably needed to reach out for the oxygen tank and mask after a conducting session.

he's in the news:

http://news.google.com.pe/news/searc...=en&q=ticciati

they say that he conducted very well