It's a little shocking but a Zinman Les Noces and Petrushka just appeared online. The Les Noces is very very good and very very slow, not 'Stravinsky's birthday-album' slow, but this is Les Noces under a microscope. Once the performance gels after some spottiness toward the beginning, you hear every line, and yet it doesn't sound cold at all. This is probably the warmest and most 'singing' Les Noces you'll ever hear, which considering the source is quite a surprise. Zinman has always been so fleet and balletic. Zinman is older and clearly suffering from some of old age's frailties in recent years, it's a shame that now when he's finally a semi-celebrity, he can't communicate with orchestras with that Carlos Kleiber level technique he used to have.
It's hard for those who've rarely heard him live to have any idea just how great he gets. Live recordings are certainly better, but it's impossible on record to hear how distinctive and individuated Zinman's music making is. What is awe-inspiring in the concert hall is just fastidious and vaguely exciting, while the mic flatters a reckless one like Gergiev who gets to edit out all his mistakes.
In some ways it's easy to feel a little sorry for Zinman. Not counting Lenny, who is much more than a conductor, Zinman is honestly the greatest to ever come from the US bar none. It's not even really a competition. Levine steeply declined, MTT and Slatkin were always erratic, Previn stopped caring past a certain point, and Maazel was always... Maazel... and who else over 75 ever had enough of a career to show all they could do?
Zinman also didn't do himself any favors with his choice in rep. He's as good in Haydn and Mozart as Mackerras, but the world has hardly a shred of evidence. This is a Monteux pupil who learned everything from Monteux's during PM's brief golden age with the LSO. But only a little French music and early moderns, and he does both fantastically. 'Serious musicians' and 'stars' don't concentrate on that stuff, they concentrate on Mahler, Brahms, Beethoven, and Zinman was always just kinda.... he was perfectly fine in that stuff, but anybody who wants us to hear every detail in Mahler isn't really getting the point. The one 'gigantismus' composer he really nailed was Richard Strauss, the Wagnerian who secretly always wanted to be Mozart or Mendelssohn.
Zinman's American through-and-through. He certainly had his frustrations, but he was never a tortured artist like Tennstedt. He's a New Yorker in the same generation as Mel Brooks, perhaps most at home in ever-so-slightly lighter repertoire like Mozart and Berlioz and Ravel and Stravinsky that can still be plenty serious, and he was penalized for being too much fun. This is a conductor who earned spending money during his conservatory days by doing standup comedy at night. Bernstein talked to the audience, but in Baltimore, Zinman literally made a series of what he termed 'casual concerts' which he wanted to get on radio or TV to be the classical music equivalent to Garrison Keillor or David Letterman.
There are plenty of famous names that do Mahler and Beethoven who are not much better than OK at it, but they're thought of as revelatory in it because their ethos seems so much more serious (make your own list, I'm not tempting the lion's den...). Zinman's now been before the public.... forever... and he's finally gotten noticed for it, but he's still completely misunderstood, and hopefully there are all kinds of archival recordings from all the various places he conducted which give enough of the feel of a Zinman concert can correct the 'record.' This performance is a little more like it, because it shows that Zinman's a deep and original musician to have insights that literally nobody else has. This is a Les Noces which sounds like nobody else's.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUPaA_B-6gs
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