(Note from the end of 2025: I stand by just about everything here--except in the places I say so, but I'd have done this post differently today. This is more of a rain main-like list than a coherent musical commentary. It's a serious problem of mine. What am I not doing on the days I'm not writing? Probably making a list... I admit, it was not done with much preparation. It was probably eight hours of youtube research, based on the idea that if a musician can look at a conductor and know if he's any good within fifteen seconds, I can figure it out within five-to-ten minutes. )
We crave older recordings because everybody has the sense that newer names just aren't pulling their weight in comparison to the maestri of the past. So if you'll be so kind as to indulge me, I want to write for a second about why:
The problem with conductors today comes down to two problems: marketing and luck. Conductors today are not worse than conductors of yesteryear, but there are better conductors out there than the ones who generally get recognized. Kirill Petrenko deserves his recognition, Francois-Xavier Roth deserves his recognition, Ivan Fischer, Manfred Honeck, Blomstedt, Zinman, Dohnanyi, V. Jurowski, Pappano, Salonen, Chailly, Nagano, Vänskä, Segerstam, Deneve, even Welser-Möst (how dismissive that seems even now compared to a few years ago)... all responsible members of the profession who are 'inside' the music, commit to their appointments, add new music to their repertoires, seem think more of how they can serve music than how music serves them, and fully deserve their reputations. I believe Simon Rattle almost completely deserves his recognition though I realize there isn't much company on that hill here, and the fact that he bailed on the LSO does not speak well of him, we have a right to expect better of people looked to for leadership. But Riccardo Muti does not deserve it, Daniel Barenboim does not, Valery Gergiev and Christian Thielemann don't, Mehta and Ozawa don't, Dutoit and Gatti don't no matter their personal behavior. Dudamel and Nelsons and Nezet-Seguin are beginning to look as though they don't, and neither does MGT. We'll see about still newer names like Klaus Mäkelä and Santtu-Matias Rouvali - though I'm not holding my breath (Hrusa seems more promising...). These are podium musicians who, whatever their achievements - which are considerable in many cases, have clearly exploited the music industry's good will to take more than they give back, and perhaps it shows in their musicmaking.
It's not that this excess of names thrown out in criticism are at all bad conductors, the reason they're promoted to the top of the profession so quickly is because their gifts are nothing short of brilliant, but they're clearly inconsistent from week to week. The problem is in no way their lack of talent, it's that the expectations of modern musicmaking are by and large impossible, and only the strong can refuse the lure of celebrity: play everywhere, every week, make boatloads of money, have adoring fans throw themselves at you, don't spend much time in the cities where you're appointed, don't get to know your players, rely on sight reading for new scores, and usually just repeat the same music from decade to decade.
It's not real music making, and the problem does not start with them. The problem starts with the music business which wants celebrity names to promote from cradle to grave (and Karajan, who was as much businessman as musician...).
Daniel Barenboim, just to take one example, is nothing short of a musical genius, but he was promoted as such from the time he was twelve, and as such, he never went through the usual loops of a career, and he relied on his natural musical ability to get him through it. It's truly extraordinary how well he's done while cutting so many corners, but rather than learn more than a minimum of new repertoire, it's the same Beethoven and Bruckner and Wagner from decade to decade, while performing so many concerts he can't possibly be fully in the moment at even half of them. Half the time as a pianist he sounds like he hasn't practiced, and half the time as a conductor he sounds like he's not really there. But he's Barenboim, and for such a leftist, it's amazing how much he's relied on the market to promote his name and let his brand be a guarantee of quality which he doesn't give.
Barenboim is hardly alone in this manner - one could make the same arguments of Maazel or Muti, they are as brilliant as musicians get, so why are their results so often of a quality well under what their names promise? The reason is that they're celebrities, and we give celebrities too many opportunities and smaller names too few.
This was probably true back in the day too, but to a lesser extent. Music Directors had to stay with their orchestras and opera houses for at least half the year, and appointments in multiple countries were damn near impossible. Many orchestras and conductors clearly didn't get along, but it forced them to work on musical problems like people in a lifelong marriage are forced to work on theirs', and while the results were often predictably volatile, it's only long commitment that guarantees fulfillment.
Success in the world depends on attacking problems from the center, the root, and the ability to stay balanced amid thousands of chaotic forces. Some of these conductors have the problem, as so many musicians do, that they throw themselves into the music, recklessly, shapelessly, letting instinct guide them without enough forethought. Others among them have the problem that their presentation is all surface and immaculate, and show no evidence of anything underneath it - no insight, no passion, no enthusiasm, no evidence that they care. There were obviously plenty of conductors who exhibited the former problem in the Goldener Age: Furtwangler, Mitropoulos, Koussevitzky, de Sabata, but you could never accuse the four of them of not thinking deeply about what they do. and among the conductors who cared most for great technique, whatever their faults, you could never accuse Toscanini or Rodzinski or Szell or Dorati of lack of passion. Amid those flawed but still very great names, you had so many conductors who were truly 'inside' the music: Monteux, Walter, Beecham, Coates, Ansermet, Paray, Klemperer, Munch, Kleiber, Busch, etc. etc. etc.
This is what makes the sudden appearance in middle age of conductors like Kirill Petrenko, Francois-Xavier Roth, Manfred Honeck, Markus Stenz, so very delightful, and so very surprising. These are guys who came up rather slowly. While Dudamel and YNS got the cheering crowds, these guys did the grunt work in smaller places and smaller houses, only to arrive on the international A-list scene as though fully formed, the same way that, a generation or two ago, fully-formed maestros arrived in middle age on the international circuit named Tennstedt, and Jansons, and Jarvi, and Dohnanyi, and Mackerras, and Zinman. Sure, they were around before in some capacity, but what among those names had any sort of genuine eminence before 40? How many of them achieved anything like celebrity even before 50?
So with that in mind, I want to give names of living conductors, both young and old, whom I think would be worthy of golden age names if ever given the chance to prove themselves, and there are a lot of them.
I have contacts in the music world who tell me unflattering things about certain conductors whom I esteem very much, both on boards like the ones I write on and in private, obviously there's an enormous amount of variability among orchestral musicians as to which musicians believe which conductors are worthy of pantheon inclusion.
I value the word of orchestral musicians enormously, even though or especially since no two orchestral musicians seem to agree, the insights they can give are always invaluable to understanding what goes on in the music. If anyone ever feels like telling me things in private I can keep a secret, but I do often think certain conductors are overvalued and undervalued because of their technical acumen or lack thereof. I understand why, orchestral musicians work very hard to be able to sound good, and we should appreciate orchestras for that and it's understandable that orchestral musicians particularly appreciate conductors able to present orchestras in their best light. But at least among listeners who really appreciate what you do - we don't really care if there are mistakes in some places. What we care about is getting new insights into the music, and some conductors are much better at that than others.
Some overvalued names (merely in my opinion), like Barenboim, Gergiev, Muti, can give enormous insights, but they're very inconsistent, and when you're given that amount of celebrity, you should be bringing your A-game all the time. The results can be bizarre and we can disagree with the choices, but if we've made them into celebrities, their choices have to be made with thought, and they'd better not sound bored or disengaged. They owe us at least that.
But when I hear musicians, and there are a lot of them, who can bring perfect surfaces to everything they conduct and/or play and no evidence of a beating heart underneath, I despair of the future of music. This didn't used to be true pre-Karajan, pre-Heifetz, pre-Michelangeli. Say what we will of the popular music which has the heart of the world, lack of heart is not their problem.
Leaving aside names who frequent the boards I frequent, like Andrey Boreyko, Alexander Walker, Theodore Kuchar, Hartmut Hänchen, here are names of people who deserve to be looked up. A few of these have slightly variable reputations, but let's face it, names like Venzago, Kalmar, Mena, Inbal, or Schønwandt haven't thrown nearly as many concerts as Gergiev or Barenboim or Dudamel (or even perhaps Rattle). They haven't had the opportunities to. And when they've been called on to do things which are higher profile, like Schønwandt's Ring Cycle, Inbal's Mahler cycles, Kalmar's Pentatone recordings in Oregon, many of them have truly, deeply delivered the goods. Some of these names are old, some are young, and all are very, very good.
10's: A Great Chance of Being As Good as it Gets if Given a Chance If Given a High Profile:
(Celebrity 10s: Markus Stenz, Ivan Fischer, Kirill Petrenko) (Was Markus Stenz ever a star?...)
Miguel Harth-Bedoya
Joanna Mallwitz (she became a star in just the time since this post)
Eliahu Inbal
Omer Meir Wellber
Ben Gernon
Rune Bergmann
Mazaaki Suzuki (though I'm sure he's highly valued in the HIP world he's a great conductor by any standard)
Harry Christophers (ditto) (Holy crap how did I think Suzuki and Christophers were obscure enough for this list?)
Joshua Weilerstein (he's quite good, a 10 was pushing it...)
John Nelson (RIP)
Gianluigi Gelmetti (RIP)
Kees Bakels
Yuri Simonov (was I... really wrong here? I love his performances, nobody else does)
Vaclav Luks (definitely not a ten)
Antonello Manacorda (on his way to becoming a star)
Daniel Raiskin
Dmitri Jurowski (Russian collaborator, now a 0)
Carlos Izcaray
Gabor Takacs-Nagy (still my favorite living performing musician)
9's: A Good Chance:
(Celebrity 9's: David Zinman, Manfred Honeck, Vladimir Jurowski)
Tito Muńoz
Claus Peter Flor
Vassily Sinaisky
Courtney Lewis
Frederic Chaslin
Libor Pesek (RIP)
Kristjan Järvi (the jury's still out, but at this point he's definitely the least of the Jarvis...)
Marcus Bosch (how did I decide to put Marcus Bosch at 9 and not Markus Poschner at 10?)
Jorge Mester
Michael Schønwandt (i only ever heard one complaint about Michael Schonwandt, everybody else loves him...)
Bernhard Klee (RIP)
Marc Albrecht (if you believe Bachtrack, no other podium musician seems to consistently get reviews that bad. I dunno, he seems pretty good to me...)
Ryan Bancroft (he's a star now)
Michael Francis
Yan Pascal Tortelier
Cornelius Meister
David Dansmayr (love the videos I saw, the concert I saw a few months later was not as impressive...)
Marek Janowski (not exactly an unknown)
Alexander Anissimov
8's: A Decent Chance:
(Celebrity 8's: Simon Rattle, Leif Segerstam, Michael Tilson Thomas) (come on Evan... you know Rattle deserves higher than that)
William Eddins
Alexandre Bloch
Jamie Martin
Michel Plasson (RIP)
Steven Mercurio
Aleksandar Marković
Juanjo Mena
Jun Märkl
Robert Trevino
Ben Zander
Hannu Lintu (jesus, Lintu at just an 8? What were you smoking??)
Günther Herbig (9 at least)
John Storgards (definite 9)
Christoph König
Carlos Kalmar (well, we'll never see him again...)
Lothar Zagrosek
Jukka-Pekka Saraste
Joanne Faletta
Mark Wigglesworth (deserved a 9)
Oleg Caetani
Lorenzo Viotti (technique seemed really good and he seemed like he was communicating. Then friends heard really bad concerts of his and he took his clothes off on instagram...)
7's: At Least Very Good:
(Celebrity 7's: Antonio Pappano, Gianandrea Noseda, Esa-Pekka Salonen)
Ha-Nan Chang (at least 8)
Alexander Lazerev
Andrew Davis (RIP, and most uncharitable)
Zdenek Macal (RIP)
Jose Serebrier
Wayne Marshall
Carolyn Kuan
Xian Zhang
Emanuelle Villaume
Nicholas Collon
David Afkham
Gerry Walker
Thierry Fischer (jesus H. Christ Evan... a few weeks later you must have realized this guy is one of the best podium musicians on the planet...)
Mario Venzago (didn't want to risk fights, but have heard Venzago live probably 10 times, and live, he's as good as a musician gets while not worrying about technique and taking risks that foolhardy)
Gemma New
(Not quite as bad as you feared. You weren't deaf, you just were deaf to a few howlers... )
Modesty forbids ranking farther down, and there are plenty who deserve to be further down, especially among celebrities, but just look all these conductors up. I think you'll be surprised by how delighted you are.
(The six conductors who formed my tastes from hearing them live a number of times were, in order from classical to romantic: David Zinman, Mariss Jansons, Ivan Fischer, Markus Stenz, Simon Rattle and Manfred Honeck, The majority of them get magnificent playing from a techincal point of view, but more important is that, with the exceptions perhaps on the tale ends, none of them have a 'true personality' or 'brand' in which you know exactly whom the leader is by hearing them, and yet each of them is absolutely full of personality. By occupying that huge space between classical and romantic, they are 'alive,' you don't knwo what they're going to do, and in that sense, they're less predictable than maestri who have a much less subtle bag of tricks. As Carlos Kleiber, the much too self-conscious virtuoso, said, think of manners, the more you 'behave', the more you can break the rules. The more you obey the dynamics, the more every change you make in them registers. In that sense, more alive than more exhibitionist romantics, and certainly more durable. The older generations? At this point: E. Kleiber, Dohnanyi, Mackerras, Rozhdestvensky, Klemperer, Steinberg, Busch, Monteux, Abravanel, Walter, Kubelik, Fricsay, Harnoncourt, Munch. They are truly inside the music, and with the exception only of Kubelik, they do it by allowing enormous freedom within a very strict framework--which Munch also lets go of pretty often... Their formidable technical control exists to empower the musicians to express with 100 percent commitment and no little imagination. This is the ultimate difference between them and the slick, smoothened, excessively loud aesthetic of Karajan and the progeny who go to such lengths to emulate him. One wants to dominate us, the other wants to empower us.
More lists, I know, but I'll come back to this to make a much larger point.)
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