The greatest conductor I ever heard live was Mariss Jansons. Whatever the genre, there are some musicians who send those who hear them into something irrational, the way I remember Jansons, the way so many others speak of him, speaks to the fact that his concerts were a deep spiritual experience one feels lucky to ever encounter during one's lifetime.
Had I been a little older I might have heard Klaus Tennstedt, and I suspect that of all the conductors of recent lifetimes, there was no one who provided that spiritual uplift the way Tennstedt did and no conductor of the 20th century ever did except Klemperer. One might fault Tennstedt for sloppy playing or overromanticizing, but faultless performances are usually also featureless performances.
In Jansons, in Tennstedt, in only a few other greats (Make your own list....), you felt a whole soul, overseeing a community of musicians and audience with both passion and compassion, perhaps drawn out by some very deep and painful wound of life in just the same way you feel it within the music of so many of the world's greatest composers and creative artists of all genres. Richter and Sokolov bring this quality to their piano playing. Just a uninhibited pure communication of experience with neither lack of humanity, nor overlofty gloom, nor overglamorizing, nor pomposity, nor over-prioritizing technique, nor putting style over substance, nor artificial excitement. Make up your own list for who does each.
This quality involves the ability to show that you've hugged this music for every last drip of communication between the musicians, audience, and music, and as I arrive in middle age with a crashing thud, that is the quality I wish to hear over every other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eUz56fzTik
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=100QYXLFiTs
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