Instead of James Levine, listen to better conductors who were good people. Just in his generation: Mariss Jansons, Christoph von Dohnanyi, and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski all survived the very worst of the world, never so far as we know collaborated with any of it, were known as class acts who stood up for what's right on many occasions, were highly valued by those who worked with them, and left unsurpassable legacies. Everybody in classical music knows about Jansons, and everybody at least pays lip service to Dohnanyi who is often misunderstood as a cold Prussian, but SS was kind of a well-kept secret to his glorious end.
I have no idea what Skrowaczewski was like as a younger man, and a certain highly valued and venerable musical friend with ample experience of the young SS tells me that he wasn't much. All I can do is write briefly of Skrowaczewski the éminence grise: A Klemperer-like musician who built music brick-by-brick. He's one of those who seems to view music like an ethical force, who endowed every musician and every note with the right to be fully heard. One of those humble souls who gained nothing like stardom until his dotage, and in his final years achieved a rare musical ideal which united the rational, intellectual, formal side of music with the irrational, emotional, spiritual, side. His music making never seems to lack emotion, and yet no seam shows. Except for enormous labor and care, there is no evidence present of how he did it.
Daniel Barenboim talks in a bunch of interviews about the importance of 'becoming' in music, as opposed to mere 'being,' and how for certain inferior musicians music simply 'is.' Barenboim was wrong, music simultaneously 'is' and 'becomes.' The artistic possibilities of the world lay latent all around us, and true mastery does not stop at letting art become what we would like it to become, everything which becomes already is, and true mastery is when the artist becomes what the art has always been.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n7XKx-OhCI
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