Berislav Klobucar and other Central European Conductors

 What conductors get the sound out of orchestras you most want to hear? For me it's Central Europeans who make orchestras sound as free as folk music: Kubelik, Fricsay, Kletzki and Silvestri. Not 'volk' music, but music in its most organic state where everything feels as though it springs from the most basic human needs. Details come through clearly, but nothing is overrefined. Every musician expresses from within like a soloist. It creates, at least in my ears, a very specific sound, in which no musician sounds like they play with any inhibition at all. Some in their various ways get close from elsewhere in Europe: Monteux, Busch, Jochum, but the ability to get exactly this sound seems to be a secret recipe from marginalized parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire. 

Another Central European who has that elusive folk spontaneity in infinite quantity: Berislav Klobucar.

I'm not going to take the time to find the quote, but Schoenberg would talk about how style was so implicit that in old Vienna, even the cafe violinists would know how to slow up a second subject to make it more meaningful without it even registering to the listeners that the tempo had changed. Old Vienna is not the only way to capture the essential style of classical music, and a lot of Viennese conductors are much too elegant and refined for lowly peasants like me.

In Kurt Herbert Adler's memoir, he writes that Klobucar would have been one of the greatest conductors the SF Opera ever played under if he hadn't been so nice to the orchestra and compelled them play the way he wanted them to. But doing that might have lost the 'freedom' Klobucar elicited from them in which the musicians seem to phrase on wing, playing with complete sincerity and commitment, and not knowing how it's going to come together until the moment it happens.

This isn't the only way to get that freedom. Fricsay and Silvestri worked their orchestras like dogs, and yet their performances still sound as though the expression comes from the orchestra rather than the conductor. Klobucar was clearly much more laissez-faire, like Kubelik, and excepting some very subtle rubato that gently guides the music to a harmonic goal, the music sounds as though he trusts the musicians to bring something unique enough that it can't possibly come from any central authority figure.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBEwVv2CweQ...