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Your favorite conductors

21K views 70 replies 50 participants last post by  msr13 
#1 ·
Two of my favorites, style-wise, have to be Carlos Kleiber and Nicholas Harnoncourt. I have an old VHS tape of Kleiber conducting Beethoven's 4th and 7th symphonies. Fantastic! If you haven't seen it, you do not know what you are missing!

Harnoncourt too can be very expressive with the baton.

Which others should I check out (on You-Tube) or wherever?
 
#18 ·
OMG! That just made my day! You can see the couple to his right whispering to each other; probably saying: How the %#@ does he do that? Pure charisma, baby!

Favorite conductors for me? Furtwangler and Mengelberg. Gotta go Old School. If only they'd left behind quality STEREO recordings they would be straight-up GODS now. ;)

Oh well, at least we good recordings of Bernstein and Solti!

And Karajan. Some people complain about his "homogenized sound." But he did make some awesome recordings.
 
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#4 ·
I don't usuallly watch video clips of conductors, however, I like the musical approach of Karl Böhm, George Szell, Eugen Jochum. They sound "classical" to me.

One youtube video I remember is Mravinsky conducting a Shostakovich symphony (No. 10?). He made conducting look easy and yet the sound I heard was very intense. The video image and the sound didn't seem to go together - weird.
 
#6 ·
Here's Mr. Kleiber in action.......... the best conductor ever as voted by 100 leading conductors. See BBC Music Magazine 2010. a revelation:

 
#7 ·
In days gone by I would have listed a few but these days I increasingly realise that it is highly repertoire dependent. No one conductor has all the insights into every composition. And that is what I value most in a conductor: insight.

That said there are a couple of "star" conductors who I find totally unlistenable +90% of the time, but even they can sometimes surprise me in the right repertoire just when I had them written off.
 
#12 ·
Conductors who I would put in the "favorite" category are the ones who've opened up a composer or genre to me. John Eliot Gardiner got me into vocal music; Martinot got me to appreciate Debussy; Kondrashin opened up Shostakovich; Rosdvensky - however you spell it - introduced me to Glazunov and made Tchaikovsky make sense; Tintner made me love Bruckner.

Other conductors do great things (like Furtwangler and Kleiber), but these in my list stand out for what they've brought to me.
 
#14 · (Edited)
Here's a video of Kleiber rehearsing the overture to Der Freischütz.

Part 1/3


Part 2/3 :
Part 3/3 :

Enjoy. Oh, and there's another rehearsal videos of Kleiber for Strauss's Die Fledermaus overture, you can find it on the suggestion bar on the right (if you go to the youtube links).

EDIT : Why can't the videos show up. Oh well, I guess you'll just have to go directly to the links I provided.
 
#17 · (Edited)
Stokowski is my absolute favorite, but I also really like Furtwangler, Toscanini, Bernstein, Walter, Szell, Abbado, and Kleiber. There are quite a few recordings by Bohm and Sinopoli I like a lot too..

I generally like Reiner, Munch. Monteux, Solti, Leinsdorf, Koussevitsky and Tennstedt. I like Dutoit for the French and I like Tilson Thomas's American composers. Karajan runs hot and cold for me.

I'm not so fond of Boulez, Haitink, Davis, Mehta, Levine or Ozawa, although there are individual things by some of them that I like.
 
#21 ·
My all time favourite conductor has got to be Wilhelm Furtwangler. No doubt at all, I only wish he could have lasted a little longer like Otto Klemperer and left some stereo recordings in his legacy. That said, I would not part with any of his mono recordings. This one of the few areas where picking a favourite is truly simple.

Otto Klemperer, Sir Thomas Beecham, Leonard Bernstein, Klaus Tennstedt, Karl Bohm and Rudolf Kempe are also in high regard.

Of today's active conductors, I particularly like Claudio Abbado, Sir Andrew Davis, Belohlavek, Vasily Petrenko and Vladimir Jurowski.

There are others but this is about favourites and that for me is Furtwangler.
 
#23 ·
Boulez is the guy for quite a lot of 20th century stuff. HvK is great for German late Romanticism. Jordi Savall is my favourite HIPster, although Jos van Immerseel is a close second. Solti and Harnoncourt just don't do bad performances of anything.
 
#24 ·
To be honest, I haven't been listening purposively to classical music for long enough to have formed an opinion about a great many conductors.

Carlo Maria Giulini definitely ranks among my top choices, though. He's done great recordings of the works of some of my favourite composers, most notably Brahms, Dvorak and Bruckner. Among others, his renditions of the Dvorak cello concerto with Rostropovich and of Bruckner 8 and 9 with the Wiener Philharmoniker are comfortably my favourite recordings of those pieces. His tempi are frequently slower than the norm, which suits me just fine.

I'm also a fan of Claudio Abbado. The first Bruckner I heard was the recording of his performance of 5 with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in 2011, and it immediately grabbed me.
 
#25 ·
I find there are two kinds of good conductors... ones with unique approaches that hit the stratosphere, and ones who are dependable and solid. You know when you pick up their CD, it will be good. Stokowski is the perfect example of the former group, and Abbado is a good representative of the latter.
 
#27 ·
Otto Klemperer. Just cannot get enough of this man. Every note he renders produces profound weight and a sense of space. Perhaps it is the slow tempi that creates this brooding texture. However, the tempo itself isn't the issue - sometimes I cannot bear Celibidache. For that matter, try Bernstein's late recordings of Sibelius no. 2. I cannot help myself from falling asleep due to his uber-slackening tendencies. So there is a unique quality in the phrasing of maestro Klemperer. (It almost comes ironic, since Klemperer apparently rarely gave specific instruction during rehearsals.)
 
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