Brief conductor comment:
I'd say 25% of any profession are truly good at what they do. 5% are better than good. And 1 in every 1000 are truly, cosmically great. So there are few truly great ones. 50% of conductors, like professionals of any type, have deep strengths but are hidebound by flaws just as deep, and 25% just are bad.
Purely in terms of performance, there are exactly three conductors I've ever heard live whom I am absolutely positive are nothing short of cosmically great: Mariss Jansons, now gone. Christoph von Dohnanyi, now well in his 90s and at very least semi-retired. And Kirill Petrenko, who will hopefully be among us for another fifty years. All three give the kinds of performance that can never go out of fashion because they are so clearly skeptical of every approach. They approach every performance problem as close to its exact root as mortals can get, and so often they hit the exact mid point between classicism and romanticism, objectivity and subjectivity, old school tradition and historically informed performance, clarity and atmosphere, fidelity to the score and freedom in performance. They keep their eyes on the total form of a work and maximize the personality of every detail within. I can understand people thinking this approach tries to be everything to all people, but I think of what I hear from them as the thing in itself.
That is not to say that they are great in other ways. When I think of my true performance heroes, they have broader repertoires and are willing to put their reputations on the line for music people dislike. Gennadi Rozhdestvensky is a hero of mine, Rostropovich is a hero, Marc-Andre Hamelin is a hero, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is a hero, Lorraine Hunt Liebersen is a hero. These conductors are not heroes, they are just masters of what they do and maestri in the truest sense.
Jansons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqrGkYarIJY
Dohnanyi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMIP4ygm334
Petrenko: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5ZIPNermbc
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