Priest #1: This is the greatest thing that's happened to us.
Priest #2: The greatest thing?
#1: The greatest thing.
#2: What's the greatest thing?
#1: The capture of the Torah.
#2: Blasphemy!
#1: Do you really want to spend the rest of your life cleaning up the shit and blood of dead cows?
By the time I heard MTT live, he was not what he was. My first time hearing him was in San Francisco, 2009. His technique was much more economical, his interpretations much more restrained. As my father, brother and I sat behind the stage, he did a varied program of an Ollie Knussen American premiere, Strauss's Four Last Songs with Deborah Voigt which we could barely hear, Medea's Vengeance Monologue from Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, and Beethoven's 4th. The Barber was easily the highlight, though, again we couldn't hear it, and the Beethoven was merely pleasant and barely memorable. I heard him twice again, in a merely pleasant Mahler Resurrection screwed up by the always uncommitted National Symphony, and a program at Carnegie that was built for MTT: Firebird, Stravinsky Violin Concerto with Kavakos, and the Rite of Spring. Only Sacre was any good, and it was merely good.
By then, MTT had done so much that he'd cemented his place in history as one of the all-time great podium musicians, but he was not quite what he was. Let's remember the conductor he was until the late 2000's, one of the most gifted and exciting to ever pick up a baton, who did more for music with the smallest chamber of his heart than most conductors of his generation did with their whole brains.
Essentials:
