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Conductors you trust, and ones you don’t

I came to this thread hoping to learn how those in-the-know rated Mehta and Ozawa, as I have a fair bit of both. I suppose their absence means they run hot and cold(?).

Never heard anything by Mehta that justifies that he keeps getting gigs with the likes of the Vienna and Berlin Phil..... he's never bad but never that great either. Fell asleep watching him conduct Bruckner 8 once. But as mentioned earlier, his Turandot with Pavarotti and Sutherland is quite something.

Ozawa - hit or miss, heard good and dull from him. Good Bruckner & Brahms with his Saito Kinen Orchestra, dull Mahler with the Boston Symphony.. but a stunning Gurrelieder, years before it became a fashionable event piece.
 
Interesting that Gergiev is in the ‘not trusted’ category. I think of him as ‘when he’s good he’s very good but when not, not’. I also find his conducting, seen on tv and dvd, rather strange. When conducting without baton, he flutters his hands which seems to me (a non musician) to obscure the beat and the shaping of the music. And sometimes he uses a baton the size of a cocktail stick. Very odd.
 
I very much admired Richard Hickox for his understanding of Tippett's Symphonies. Other conductors seem to miss the important timing cues. I see he had a great reputation conducting other music and operas. I must investigate sometime.
 
Hickox was very good, we saw him at the festival hall doing the Faure Requiem, it was so wonderful that no one applauded for what seemed like half a minute, then the house came down. Later we saw him at the Barbican doing Gerontius, unfortunately we were near the front but right off to one side and the soloists kept moving back and forward masking each other which made for a poor sound - performance was good though.

We were due to see him do Riders to the Sea at ENO, sadly he died just before the performance, a great loss.
 
IMO Mehta's best stuff seems to be to be the early Decca recordings, particularly with the LA Phil - a great Nielsen 4, Schmidt 4 (a classic) and a very good Mahler 2, both VPO and there are some others. Likewise, Ozawa's Boston years produced good things and a thrilling early Bartok/ Lutoslawski disc with Chicago. Like many conductors, they went onto auto-pilot in later years and just became boring.
 
Hickox was very good, we saw him at the festival hall doing the Faure Requiem, it was so wonderful that no one applauded for what seemed like half a minute, then the house came down. Later we saw him at the Barbican doing Gerontius, unfortunately we were near the front but right off to one side and the soloists kept moving back and forward masking each other which made for a poor sound - performance was good though.

We were due to see him do Riders to the Sea at ENO, sadly he died just before the performance, a great loss.

I'm fond of a lot of Hickox recordings, and he was indefatigable with neglected repertoire. In mainstream stuff he could hold his own, and you've mentioned Gerontius - his is one of my favourites, mainly for Arthur Davies, a tenor who seems to me just right for the part - whatever happened to him, I wonder ?
 
I'm fond of a lot of Hickox recordings, and he was indefatigable with neglected repertoire. In mainstream stuff he could hold his own, and you've mentioned Gerontius - his is one of my favourites, mainly for Arthur Davies, a tenor who seems to me just right for the part - whatever happened to him, I wonder ?

Retired from performing, taught vocal studies in Cardiff and died in 2018.

His singing in the Kenneth Alwyn recording of Coleridge Taylor`s Hiawatha is superb.
 
OK, if we're getting into Mahler 2, dontcha feel we need more detail to say WHY a particular version is "excellent" .... ?
My CBSO Rattle is excellent because he signed it.

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I just listened to Mahler 3 by Abbado-Lucerne FO and damn, that orchestra is as tight as anything at the conclusion of the first movement. And that big moment towards the end of the third movement? Wow! So yeah, Abbado is trustworthy :)

 
Two recent conductors not yet mentioned that I rate highly: Francois-Xavier Roth and his band Les Siecles and Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra. In both cases excellent in their own national music, eg Ravel and Kodaly, respectively.
Roth was the most musically striking conductor I’d never heard of until last year, his orchestra too. Right of Spring on ‘period instruments’, surly they’re modern instruments? I thought. It was a unique experience.

Another who can work similar magic, different repertoire, is William Christie.
Franz Welser-Möst I didnt trust in his 20s and I don’t think orchestras did (judging by the results) but he’s turned out to be excellent. A friend calls him Frankly Worst than Most ( I can’t write what he calls Montserrat Caballe).

Harnoncourt I have difficulty with at times.

Worst conducting experience ever, Christopher Seaman, in a period where lacklustre British conducting was matched by ill-disciplined U.K. orchestras outside London.

Least trusted- Masaaki Suzuki because I asked him to sign my concert ticket and he fixed me with a penetrating look and very slowly wrote some incomprehensible on the back which I took to be “**** off” in Japanese.
 
Worst conducting experience ever, Christopher Seaman, in a period where lacklustre British conducting was matched by ill-disciplined U.K. orchestras outside London.

Remember Beecham`s comment - "I don`t know why we use so many third rate foreign conductors in this country when we have so many second rate ones of our own".
 
Trust makes me think of branding. When I was 21 I thought Karajan was the best, in fact couldn’t see past him but that wasn't borne out of comparative listening it’s because it was the era of big label dominance and no label was more dominant than DG. He was very heavily marketed which doesn’t mean to say he and his orchestra didn’t produce superlative results but it felt like a monoculture.

Back at that age classical music felt like great monuments created by demigods and conductors like K were demigods themselves. The pleasure came principally the beauty of the form of the music and the emotions it evoked but I had little understanding of the the artistic, historic milieu the composer operated in or really much understanding of the role of the conductor beyond ‘faster, slower, louder, quieter’.


Russians:
The two conductors I most admire: Svetlanov and Temirkanov.
The conductor I dislike the most ( though he is one of the finest pianists alive) is Pletnev. I bought a recording of his Tchaikovsky Symphony No.6 and gave it to charity the next day. I’ve heard him with his orchestra and it was musically awful- conducting and playing. They looked scared of him.
 
My CBSO Rattle is excellent because he signed it.

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Probably my least favourite Mahler 2. Turgid and plodding….

I don’t have a list of conductors I trust. There are some orchestras I love listening to. The BBC Phil have the most stunning string section, Berlin and Vienna Phil too. Haitink had a great run. The Concertgebouw are the fabulous orchestra in many of Haitink’s recordings. The wonderful American orchestras as well of Chicago, Boston and New York. An honourable mention for Dallas as well. I always find it interesting to listen to record review on R3, you get some excellent examples of the wayward approaches some conductors have.

Bernstein has some amazing moments, but often the performance is unsatisfactory as a whole, he seemed to spend his life seeking to wring out every last bit of emotion, he sometimes forgets that light and shade are necessary, to have highs you need lows. Had the pleasure of performing and working on the Bernstein Beat a few years ago with a bunch of talented kids in Manchester. I was very excited to meet Nina Bernstein as part of that!! Bernstein does exciting, but sometimes everything else gets lost in the quest.
 
Charles Mackerras is fast becoming a conductor I can trust.

Yes I'd put him on the trusted list too.... Never heard a bad recording by him. You wouldn't associate him with Sibelius, but I've got a Sibelius 2nd with him and the LSO from late 1980s and it's excellent.

But his SCO Beethoven 7th.... Wow. Even better than Kleiber BPO IMO.
 
In live performance no conductor in my experience is entirely "trustworthy", if by that is meant "doesn't occasionally do strangely inappropriate things". But that's OK, and I won't give examples because the whole league table thing is misguided anyway.

Conductors I had never heard before have often done great things - Kevin John Edusei in Barber 1, for example. And well established but underrated conductors can give wonderful performances: Michael Seal's Malcolm Arnold 5 in a CBSO socially-distanced matinee in 2021 was easily the finest I've heard, better than all five recordings. It told us firmly that live music would survive the pandemic, so maybe that contributed to the magic.
 


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