Conducting Ideal

What conductors, if any, get somewhere reasonably close to your orchestral ideal? Not necessarily best, not necessarily favorites, but the conductors who best represent the way you want music to sound? Personally, I want music that flows, glows, and breathes. I want a conductor without a capital c and an orchestra without a capital o. I don't need every detail to be exactly right, I almost don't like when details draw attention to themselves. I want to hear how everything connects to itself as a whole in the larger sweep of it all, as though part of a great river. I want lots of flexibility in the pulse, but only in certain moments. The crucial places to have that irregularity in the pulse is in the moments of structural flaws, which great composers often write deliberately - where the composition has too much sequential vamping, or unprepared modulations, or an awkward transition to a new subject, or when the music is impossible to articulate properly at the set tempo. I generally prefer tempi that are a little bit above average speed, but there are many times when slower-than-average tempi are more obviously preferable, and more often than not, tempi that dramatically differ from the norm rarely work particularly well, precisely because the orchestra won't have enough control to be flexible. I want beautiful sound, but never beauty for its own sake. I want risk-taking, but for the risks not to be too large and managed so that they pay off. I don't really care about the size of the orchestra, a great large orchestra is perfectly capable of sounding small, and a great chamber orchestra can sound large. I don't care about precision, I almost don't like it and past a certain point, I find it anti-musical. Much more important than hearing the precision of attack is hearing the overtones, which is where expressive stuff happens that most affects us, and that depends on a fully present and rich bass line and a cantabile sound (which does not mean constant beauty of tone or vibrato either). I want what I hear to sound as if each player feels empowered to express themselves like a soloist. I think it's crucial to have an enormous range of dynamics, but never to overdo the rhetoric either - something that can build enormous force when called for, but never sound 'forced.' Maybe it's the American in me, but I want classical music to sound like folk music or street music. I want it to feel as though the conductor is in dialogue with the orchestra, contributing his own ideas but also accepting other people's individual expression. I want a story that matches the expression to the need of the moment that feels as individually creative as improvisation, and simultaneously as though it could never be any other way.

So, amid all that descriptive bullshit, my ideal is Rafael Kubelik and Fritz Busch, with particular honorable mentions to Ferenc Fricsay and Pierre Monteux, and among contemporary conductors, Ivan Fischer and Markus Stenz. Other honorable mentions should probably include Bruno Walter, Silvio Varviso, William Steinberg, Maurice Abravanel, Peter Maag, Paul Kletzki, Herbert Kegel, Berislav Klobucar, and Karel Sejna.

...and hell, representing Apollo: Mariss Jansons, William Steinberg and Erich Kleiber. Representing Dionysus: Klaus Tennstedt, John Barbirolli, and Charles Munch.

Sometimes I think the ideal is much more classical, and would cite as the ideal an Apollonian glow with much more elegant proportions and steady inevitability pacing. Other times I'd envision the ideal as a Dionysian romanticism with outsize dynamics and tempo changes as the ideal, that sucks the listener into the undertow of its storm and stress. So obviously, the way I mentioned is not the only way to greatness, but this is the way to musical greatness that generally exists when I hear the music in my own head.