So very quickly, let's talk about the four best young conductors in the world.
With conducting, the word 'young' has to be graded on a curve, and all four of them are very nearly 50 now. Conductors are not musicians in the operative sense. They don't even get to play their instrument much until their mid-20s, so like with any musician, it takes 20 years of practice before you really see which students are really extraordinary and which are merely pretty good. But the thing is that there are a different four who are supposed to be the best that have been promoted well past their achievements. All four of these now superstars were given too much attention too early, and are struggling to meet their achievements which their publicity departments set for them: Gustavo Dudamel of course of Venezuela, Yannick Nezet-Seguin of Quebec, Andris Nelsons of Latvia, and Mirga Grazynite-Tyla. We'll see about Mirga, she's not even 35 yet, but the pressure on all four is overwhelming, and none of them yet deserves it. All four can provide extraordinary feats of music making, but in between those extraordinary nights comes disappointment after disappointment.
Meanwhile, there are a further four who have presented themselves to the public and seem to have, almost overnight, superseded the superstars in accomplishment, distinction, and perhaps even their hold on the public. These four are Kirill Petrenko of Siberia/Austria, Francois-Xavier Roth of France, Vladimir Jurowski of Russia/Germany, and Teodor Currentzis of Greece/Russia. Except for Roth, who seems Parisian to the bone marrow, the rest are completely multicultural. But what distinguishes all four is not their globalism, what distinguishes them is that until five years ago, hardly anybody but specialists had ever heard of them. They gradually rose through the ranks without any heraldry from publicity departments about their stupendous gifts, no one expected extraordinary things of them until they provide extraordinary results (except Currentzis, who seems to have expected extraordinary things of himself when no one else did...), and word of mouth spread through the music world that these four were worth paying attention to. Once all four provided results, music publicists provided attendant pageantry, especially for Currentzis, who's publicity is quickly proving even more unbearable than Dudamel's. And gradually musicians awakened to the fact that these were no ordinary stick wavers but musicians of extraordinary insight and power.
But part of what is extraordinary about them is that all four represent completely different ways of making music, and are as representative of four different archetypes of music making as there can be.
Let's call Jurowski an 'architect.' Jurowski is a conductor after the manner of Toscanini, Szell, Mravinsky, Haitink, Levine.... A pure classicist. So extraordinary a technician is this type of conductor that every piece is put as definitively in place as a stone. The dynamic contrasts are overwhelming, the balances are perfect. The power of his orchestral muscle is overwhelming, and alongside that power is awesomely graceful refinement. In every Jurowski performance, a knowledgeable listener can hear details which one would never have perceived under any other conductor, and they are never details imposed but details he brings out in the score. Jurowski's repertoire is jaw-droopingly huge, and he conducts it all with awe-inspiring consistency and idiomaticity. In order for such an ascetic approach to work, one has to operate with enormous reserves of passion, and like Toscanini, Jurowski's performances can be as passionate as they are disciplined. And yet, there is always something reserved about them, never quite giving into the emotional needs of the moment, and consequently perhaps even also a little bit cold and arid. Eventually, one detects a certain level of humanity in Jurowski's performances that is missing.
Let's call Currentzis a 'performer.' Currentzis is Jurowski's exact opposite, and a listener who particularly warms to one approach would excoriate the other. For a 'performer', the score is not a schematic whose details must be realized perfectly lest the entire building fall down, but a living entity, whose interpretation always evolves from the performer's own creative notions. He is a 'romantic' conductor after the manner of Mengelberg or Stokowski or Svetlanov or Muti or Gergiev. One could make arguments that Furtwangler or Bernstein are this type but they would be controversial arguments. Musicians such as Currentzis can change everything you ever thought you knew about music you've known your whole life. Passages that make no emotional sense to your ears suddenly snap into focus. And when music calls for the height of passion, there is no sort of musician more electrifying than a Currentzis. And yet this overheat can be exhausting and just plain bizarre. Currentzis is as inconsistent as Jurowski reliable. At his best, he provides a level of emotional nourishment a Jurowski or Szell never could. But if the score calls for reserve or understatement, Currentzis cannot hold himself back, and the result, however illuminative at times, can sound like a kind of artistic mutiliation. Following the highs and lows of such artists is much like the highs and lows of substance abuse.
Let's call Petrenko a 'sculptor.' I generally prefer this type of conductor to the first two. The Kleibers was a sculptors, so were Monteux, Beecham, Klemperer, Abbado, Jansons... Sculptors and architects obviously have much in common, but sculptors allow for more flexibility of design so that they can express something that is emotionally specific as well as formally. They generally operate within the score's parameters, but within a very specific framework, there is always an enormous amount of expressive liberty, and consequently they create a kind of deeply impressive unity between hands, brain, and heart. Petrenko, like all these others, is very much a classicist, but the objectivity and discipline is leavened by a unimpeded flow of natural expression. Like these others, one may wish for more willingness to bend the rules of the score to raise the emotional temperature a bit, but like these others, one never has the sense that Petrenko is speaking the music from anywhere but his heart.
Finally, let's call Roth an 'illuminator.' This is my favorite kind of musician and the hardest whose qualities one can speak of, because while they approach the score subjectively, they do not impose a revisionist interpretation upon the music but elicit qualities in the music that were clearly already there, only now perhaps they are accented in order to bring out the emotional meanings which the composer clearly meant them to have. They believe that great music may be work of genius, the work remains unfinished and imperfect, and therefore can evolve, gently, to accumulate a greater degree of meaning. Most of my favorites clearly fall into this category: Kubelik, Munch, Mitropoulos, Rattle, Walter, Barbirolli, Fricsay, Jochum, Harnoncourt, Mackerras, Pretre, Honeck.... they're all clearly illuminators, whose neither see the score as a thing-in-itself nor as fundamentally a finished product nor as a canvas upon which one can throw one's own personal interpretation without an army of analytic, thematic, or poetical justifications.
So Roth is clearly my favorite of the four, and at the moment seems like he may be the greatest French conductor since at very least Georges Pretre. But the truth is, whether one or the other is objectively not often to one's taste, there is little denying the skill, passion, and intelligence it takes to create all four visions of music, and all four conductors create their particular visions so specifically that one would have to willfully turn away to not see that these musicians are great musicians of their type. There are many conductors of very high reputation who simply are blank slates, and have no real vision of music which they apply, these four are anything but that. So whether or not I necessarily like their music making, I deeply admire it, and in some cases stand in awe of it.
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