Silvio Varviso doing Siegfried in Stockholm. Obviously there's no such thing as 'greatest' in anything, but Varviso, who as far as I know rarely ever did concert hall conducting, had to have been as great as any opera conductor there's ever been, and flew his entire career under the radar - simply appearing in all the world's great houses and getting ensembles to play for dear life. The tempi were almost always above average, but with rubato that never, ever got in the way of the piece's momentum. Everything under him moves as freely as an Audi, and the pacing always seems to crackle.
There are some musicians whose playing is so full of personality and character, and yet you can't tell the personality of the musicians in question. When you hear Furtwangler or Toscanini or Klemperer, you can picture exactly the kind of person who makes that sort of music. And nearly all the giants of the next generation: Karajan, Bernstein, Solti, Celibidache, Giulini - it's impossible to hear them and not picture the sort of person makes that kind of music. And yet, before his Columbia period, you couldn't possibly tell the kind of person Bruno Walter was, or Pierre Monteux. Walter would talk about the importance in a conductor of 'selfless ego', and even if his performances were full of overwhelming personality, you had no idea what the personality was. Fritz Busch was the same way, Rafael Kubelik, and perhaps more than anybody else in the history of recorded opera: Ferenc Fricsay.
But there isn't a single Varviso broadcast without that Fricsay quality, where whoever is leading the music simply inhabits it like occult telepathy. The composer doesn't matter, he gets the essentials of every major opera composer and brings out their flavor almost impeccably.
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