I hope my childhood hero has a happy 90th. It is unfair he's around when my father is gone, but their personalities in my mind were very similar. Hysterically funny but blunt, utterly controlling yet democratic. He was my musical father. They met once and I remember the utter shock of seeing them next to each other. I announced to him at 8 years old my intention to become a conductor. He said: what do you play? Violin and piano. Well, that's a good start.
Here he is in what he did best and what he never recorded: he was as great a Mozartian as anyone in history, and here's a motherload. A truly idiomatic Mozart, so rhythmically alive that you hear every rhythmic irregularity, full of vocal line after a slightly over precise overture, with a perfect accompaniment of singers as he always was for soloists. Unfortunately, the radio is compressed and you can't get a sense of Zinman's extraordinary dynamic range--always planned with an intentionality that would elicit envy from Petrenko or Jurowski. This is a concert from the Minnesota Orchestra's summer season, which of course means that rehearsal time was compressed, and to get this level of playing in the summer for a full opera is something only a true maestro can do. I'd imagine there would be perkier tempi with more rehearsal time, but you can't have everything.
He probably should have left us for Minnesota after Edo De Waart left. If you read articles of the time in the Baltimore Sun, it basically seemed a done deal that Zinman would go to Minnesota and Ivan Fischer would replace him in Baltimore: IVAN FISCHER!!! But Minnesota went with an unknown gamble in Eiji Oue, music director of the redoubtable Erie Philharmonic, and while these unknowns can occasionally turn out revelations, it was generally thought a big disappointment (though there were a few nice records). All's well that ends well. Vanska gave them another golden age, Zinman became a quasi star in Zurich, and Ivan Fischer became Ivan Fischer.
The music world never got the true sense of the man. He should have been a massive star in America, he had the precision of Maazel with the soul of Bernstein, but we did not value what he did best. He was a better communicator even than Lenny--just as articulate and 100x funnier. If he ever got a TV show to explain music he'd have been a star of his generation equivalent to Abbado and Haitink, but most stars of the time were not only taller but had auras of unapproachability. Sometimes quietude like Abbado and Hatink, sometimes fear like Muti and Maazel, whereas Zinman was utterly approachable. He'd have been much more popular in the internet era.
He was both a comedian and a very serious musician. The fooling around always concealed an utterly by the book adherence to the basic rules of musicianship: every attack was precise, every line was heard, every chord was in tune, every dynamic marking was respected unless it obscured linear clarity: the vocal line was everywhere in a way that never came through over recording, but it was always over a rhythmic framework of iron. He was at the forefront of research into historically informed performance, and followed it almost too literally: when you hear the results in, say, Schubert, the insistence on dogmas of period tempi and attacks obscures the lyricism in a way more introspective conductors like Abbado don't fall for, even if they respect the research of historically informed performance.
He was a very physical, almost Carlos Kleiber-like conductor--every gesture conveying an encyclopedia of information--and his best repertoire was in the physical world. He was an extremely competent but unidiomatic conductor of most Austro-German classics. He enjoyed life too much to be a metaphysician. He was a light hearted dynamo like Beecham, but the lightheartedness also concealed a Dorati-like seriousness; almost dark and oppressive. In the end result, I always thought he was less like his mentor Monteux than he was like a warmer, wittier George Szell, whom he must have heard quite a bit when he went to Oberlin for undergrad. He was best in Haydn and Mozart, the colorful rep of France and Russian, even numbered Beethoven and Richard Strauss, 20th century rep like Stravinsky and the eclectic Americans of his generation for whom he did so much in Baltimore.
May he return to the podium, get a victory lap, and continue making music many years hence.
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