In Defense of Horenstein

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doqGV_tVwCI

For me, next to Tennstedt, this is the most inspired Bruckner 8, and I'll take it over all the usual recs: Karajan, Giulini, Wand, Celibidache, Furtwangler, it all pales in comparison to this.

Horenstein's bound to be misunderstood because there is no one out there like him. A lot of later conductors go out of their way to praise Horenstein, but there is no conductor out there with a similar aesthetic. He clearly didn't care about getting the technical niceties in the way that conductors did with some similarities like Erich Kleiber and William Steinberg. A lot of the greats of his generation have some similar qualities, but no one goes to his particular extremes.

On the one hand, he carries extreme classical balance to an extent well past Toscanini and Szell, nearly every tempo has a metric relationship to one another, which leads to a myth that he does everything in the same tempo. It's a lot more sophisticated than that; it can also, frankly, be a little ridiculous at times... But he uses that extremely classical framework to go to the most incredible violences of expression. The tempi are usually steady and broad, and he uses that slight amount of extra time to get sounds from the orchestra that at times go to the extremes of cantabile passion, and at others are extraordinary in their raw ugliness, and it can't be explained just by bad recorded sound or lack of care or skill, they are entirely deliberate and bring out the music's darkest qualities.

Is Horenstein the most underrated conductor out there? Not at this point, there are always some people singing his praises even if others want to break his reputation for all time... I wish there were people who championed William Steinberg, or Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, or Paul Kletzki (a new discovery of mine) the way they champion Horenstein. They don't go to Horenstein's extremes, but they're also less severe than Horenstein, and can paint in milder colors than Horenstein's constant urgency.

Horenstein never got a major appointment, he was probably too musically curious and uncompromising. He already had an aesthetic that was already more concerned with expression than execution, and had limited rehearsal time with second-to-fourth rate orchestras. Music is unfair, the visionaries are usually ignored and second-raters who go for business as usual are promoted to the top of the profession. There is no earth on which Horenstein was a worse conductor than Ormandy or Bohm unless you love pointing out mistakes more than you love music, but that's exactly what some people do because they're just mean-spirited and enjoy bullying people over trivialities.

Eventually, you just have to call a spade a spade and just say it outright. They're the enemy.