Great Conductors - They're Out There

(Note from the end of 2025: I stand by just about everything here--except in the places I say so, but I'd have done this post differently today. This is more of a rain main-like list than a coherent musical commentary. It's a serious problem of mine. What am I not doing on the days I'm not writing? Probably making a list... I admit, it was not done with much preparation. It was probably eight hours of youtube research, based on the idea that if a musician can look at a conductor and know if he's any good within fifteen seconds, I can figure it out within five-to-ten minutes. )

We crave older recordings because everybody has the sense that newer names just aren't pulling their weight in comparison to the maestri of the past. So if you'll be so kind as to indulge me, I want to write for a second about why:

The problem with conductors today comes down to two problems: marketing and luck. Conductors today are not worse than conductors of yesteryear, but there are better conductors out there than the ones who generally get recognized. Kirill Petrenko deserves his recognition, Francois-Xavier Roth deserves his recognition, Ivan Fischer, Manfred Honeck, Blomstedt, Zinman, Dohnanyi, V. Jurowski, Pappano, Salonen, Chailly, Nagano, Vänskä, Segerstam, Deneve, even Welser-Möst (how dismissive that seems even now compared to a few years ago)... all responsible members of the profession who are 'inside' the music, commit to their appointments, add new music to their repertoires, seem think more of how they can serve music than how music serves them, and fully deserve their reputations. I believe Simon Rattle almost completely deserves his recognition though I realize there isn't much company on that hill here, and the fact that he bailed on the LSO does not speak well of him, we have a right to expect better of people looked to for leadership. But Riccardo Muti does not deserve it, Daniel Barenboim does not, Valery Gergiev and Christian Thielemann don't, Mehta and Ozawa don't, Dutoit and Gatti don't no matter their personal behavior. Dudamel and Nelsons and Nezet-Seguin are beginning to look as though they don't, and neither does MGT. We'll see about still newer names like Klaus Mäkelä and Santtu-Matias Rouvali - though I'm not holding my breath (Hrusa seems more promising...). These are podium musicians who, whatever their achievements - which are considerable in many cases, have clearly exploited the music industry's good will to take more than they give back, and perhaps it shows in their musicmaking.

It's not that this excess of names thrown out in criticism are at all bad conductors, the reason they're promoted to the top of the profession so quickly is because their gifts are nothing short of brilliant, but they're clearly inconsistent from week to week. The problem is in no way their lack of talent, it's that the expectations of modern musicmaking are by and large impossible, and only the strong can refuse the lure of celebrity: play everywhere, every week, make boatloads of money, have adoring fans throw themselves at you, don't spend much time in the cities where you're appointed, don't get to know your players, rely on sight reading for new scores, and usually just repeat the same music from decade to decade.

It's not real music making, and the problem does not start with them. The problem starts with the music business which wants celebrity names to promote from cradle to grave (and Karajan, who was as much businessman as musician...).

Daniel Barenboim, just to take one example, is nothing short of a musical genius, but he was promoted as such from the time he was twelve, and as such, he never went through the usual loops of a career, and he relied on his natural musical ability to get him through it. It's truly extraordinary how well he's done while cutting so many corners, but rather than learn more than a minimum of new repertoire, it's the same Beethoven and Bruckner and Wagner from decade to decade, while performing so many concerts he can't possibly be fully in the moment at even half of them. Half the time as a pianist he sounds like he hasn't practiced, and half the time as a conductor he sounds like he's not really there. But he's Barenboim, and for such a leftist, it's amazing how much he's relied on the market to promote his name and let his brand be a guarantee of quality which he doesn't give.

Barenboim is hardly alone in this manner - one could make the same arguments of Maazel or Muti, they are as brilliant as musicians get, so why are their results so often of a quality well under what their names promise? The reason is that they're celebrities, and we give celebrities too many opportunities and smaller names too few.

This was probably true back in the day too, but to a lesser extent. Music Directors had to stay with their orchestras and opera houses for at least half the year, and appointments in multiple countries were damn near impossible. Many orchestras and conductors clearly didn't get along, but it forced them to work on musical problems like people in a lifelong marriage are forced to work on theirs', and while the results were often predictably volatile, it's only long commitment that guarantees fulfillment.

Success in the world depends on attacking problems from the center, the root, and the ability to stay balanced amid thousands of chaotic forces. Some of these conductors have the problem, as so many musicians do, that they throw themselves into the music, recklessly, shapelessly, letting instinct guide them without enough forethought. Others among them have the problem that their presentation is all surface and immaculate, and show no evidence of anything underneath it - no insight, no passion, no enthusiasm, no evidence that they care. There were obviously plenty of conductors who exhibited the former problem in the Goldener Age: Furtwangler, Mitropoulos, Koussevitzky, de Sabata, but you could never accuse the four of them of not thinking deeply about what they do. and among the conductors who cared most for great technique, whatever their faults, you could never accuse Toscanini or Rodzinski or Szell or Dorati of lack of passion. Amid those flawed but still very great names, you had so many conductors who were truly 'inside' the music: Monteux, Walter, Beecham, Coates, Ansermet, Paray, Klemperer, Munch, Kleiber, Busch, etc. etc. etc.

This is what makes the sudden appearance in middle age of conductors like Kirill Petrenko, Francois-Xavier Roth, Manfred Honeck, Markus Stenz, so very delightful, and so very surprising. These are guys who came up rather slowly. While Dudamel and YNS got the cheering crowds, these guys did the grunt work in smaller places and smaller houses, only to arrive on the international A-list scene as though fully formed, the same way that, a generation or two ago, fully-formed maestros arrived in middle age on the international circuit named Tennstedt, and Jansons, and Jarvi, and Dohnanyi, and Mackerras, and Zinman. Sure, they were around before in some capacity, but what among those names had any sort of genuine eminence before 40? How many of them achieved anything like celebrity even before 50?

So with that in mind, I want to give names of living conductors, both young and old, whom I think would be worthy of golden age names if ever given the chance to prove themselves, and there are a lot of them.

I have contacts in the music world who tell me unflattering things about certain conductors whom I esteem very much, both on boards like the ones I write on and in private, obviously there's an enormous amount of variability among orchestral musicians as to which musicians believe which conductors are worthy of pantheon inclusion.

I value the word of orchestral musicians enormously, even though or especially since no two orchestral musicians seem to agree, the insights they can give are always invaluable to understanding what goes on in the music. If anyone ever feels like telling me things in private I can keep a secret, but I do often think certain conductors are overvalued and undervalued because of their technical acumen or lack thereof. I understand why, orchestral musicians work very hard to be able to sound good, and we should appreciate orchestras for that and it's understandable that orchestral musicians particularly appreciate conductors able to present orchestras in their best light. But at least among listeners who really appreciate what you do - we don't really care if there are mistakes in some places. What we care about is getting new insights into the music, and some conductors are much better at that than others. 

Some overvalued names (merely in my opinion), like Barenboim, Gergiev, Muti, can give enormous insights, but they're very inconsistent, and when you're given that amount of celebrity, you should be bringing your A-game all the time. The results can be bizarre and we can disagree with the choices, but if we've made them into celebrities, their choices have to be made with thought, and they'd better not sound bored or disengaged. They owe us at least that.

But when I hear musicians, and there are a lot of them, who can bring perfect surfaces to everything they conduct and/or play and no evidence of a beating heart underneath, I despair of the future of music. This didn't used to be true pre-Karajan, pre-Heifetz, pre-Michelangeli. Say what we will of the popular music which has the heart of the world, lack of heart is not their problem.

Leaving aside names who frequent the boards I frequent, like Andrey Boreyko, Alexander Walker, Theodore Kuchar, Hartmut Hänchen, here are names of people who deserve to be looked up. A few of these have slightly variable reputations, but let's face it, names like Venzago, Kalmar, Mena, Inbal haven't thrown nearly as many concerts as Gergiev or Barenboim or Dudamel (or even perhaps Rattle). They haven't had the opportunities to. And when they've been called on to do things which are higher profile, like Inbal's Mahler cycles and Kalmar's Pentatone recordings in Oregon, many of them have truly, deeply delivered the goods. Some of these names are old, some are young, and all are very, very good.

10's: A Great Chance of Being As Good as it Gets if Given a Chance If Given a High Profile:

(Celebrity 10s: Markus Stenz, Ivan Fischer, Kirill Petrenko) (Was Markus Stenz ever a star?...)

Miguel Harth-Bedoya

Joanna Mallwitz (she became a star in just the time since this post)

Eliahu Inbal

Omer Meir Wellber

Ben Gernon

Rune Bergmann

Mazaaki Suzuki (though I'm sure he's highly valued in the HIP world he's a great conductor by any standard)

Harry Christophers (ditto) (Holy crap how did I think Suzuki and Christophers were obscure enough for this list?)

Joshua Weilerstein (he's quite good, a 10 was pushing it...)

John Nelson (RIP)

Gianluigi Gelmetti (RIP)

Kees Bakels

Yuri Simonov (was I... really wrong here? I love his performances, nobody else does)

Vaclav Luks (definitely not a ten)

Antonello Manacorda (on his way to becoming a star)

Daniel Raiskin

Dmitri Jurowski (Russian collaborator, now a 0)

Carlos Izcaray

Gabor Takacs-Nagy (still my favorite living performing musician)

9's: A Good Chance:

(Celebrity 9's: David Zinman, Manfred Honeck, Vladimir Jurowski)

Michael Schønwandt (i only ever heard one complaint about Michael Schonwandt, everybody else loves him... Note from 2026: he's become a friend, and I must say, the more I hear of him the more it's clear he's easily a 10)

Tito Muńoz

Claus Peter Flor

Vassily Sinaisky

Courtney Lewis

Frederic Chaslin

Libor Pesek (RIP)

Kristjan Järvi (the jury's still out, but at this point he's definitely the least of the Jarvis...)

Marcus Bosch (how did I decide to put Marcus Bosch at 9 and not Markus Poschner at 10?)

Jorge Mester

Bernhard Klee (RIP)

Marc Albrecht (if you believe Bachtrack, no other podium musician seems to consistently get reviews that bad. I dunno, he seems pretty good to me...)

Ryan Bancroft (he's a star now)

Michael Francis

Yan Pascal Tortelier

Cornelius Meister

David Dansmayr (love the videos I saw, the concert I saw a few months later was not as impressive...)

Marek Janowski (not exactly an unknown)

Alexander Anissimov

8's: A Decent Chance:

(Celebrity 8's: Simon Rattle, Leif Segerstam, Michael Tilson Thomas) (come on Evan... you know Rattle deserves higher than that)

William Eddins

Alexandre Bloch

Jamie Martin

Michel Plasson (RIP)

Steven Mercurio

Aleksandar Marković

Juanjo Mena

Jun Märkl

Robert Trevino

Ben Zander

Hannu Lintu (jesus, Lintu at just an 8? What were you smoking??)

Günther Herbig (9 at least)

John Storgards (definite 9)

Christoph König

Carlos Kalmar (well, we'll never see him again...)

Lothar Zagrosek

Jukka-Pekka Saraste

Joanne Faletta

Mark Wigglesworth (deserved a 9)

Oleg Caetani

Lorenzo Viotti (technique seemed really good and he seemed like he was communicating. Then friends heard really bad concerts of his and he took his clothes off on instagram...)

7's: At Least Very Good:

(Celebrity 7's: Antonio Pappano, Gianandrea Noseda, Esa-Pekka Salonen)

Ha-Nan Chang (at least 8)

Alexander Lazerev

Andrew Davis (RIP, and most uncharitable)

Zdenek Macal (RIP)

Jose Serebrier

Wayne Marshall

Carolyn Kuan

Xian Zhang

Emanuelle Villaume

Nicholas Collon

David Afkham

Gerry Walker

Thierry Fischer (jesus H. Christ Evan... a few weeks later you must have realized this guy is one of the best podium musicians on the planet...)

Mario Venzago (didn't want to risk fights, but have heard Venzago live probably 10 times, and live, he's as good as a musician gets while not worrying about technique and taking risks that foolhardy)

Gemma New

(Not quite as bad as you feared. You weren't deaf, you just were deaf to a few howlers... )

Modesty forbids ranking farther down, and there are plenty who deserve to be further down, especially among celebrities, but just look all these conductors up. I think you'll be surprised by how delighted you are.

(The six conductors who formed my tastes from hearing them live a number of times were, in order from classical to romantic: David Zinman, Mariss Jansons, Ivan Fischer, Markus Stenz, Simon Rattle and Manfred Honeck, The majority of them get magnificent playing from a techincal point of view, but more important is that, with the exceptions perhaps on the tale ends, none of them have a 'true personality' or 'brand' in which you know exactly whom the leader is by hearing them, and yet each of them is absolutely full of personality. By occupying that huge space between classical and romantic, they are 'alive,' you don't knwo what they're going to do, and in that sense, they're less predictable than maestri who have a much less subtle bag of tricks. As Carlos Kleiber, the much too self-conscious virtuoso, said, think of manners, the more you 'behave', the more you can break the rules. The more you obey the dynamics, the more every change you make in them registers. In that sense, more alive than more exhibitionist romantics, and certainly more durable. The older generations? At this point: E. Kleiber, Dohnanyi, Mackerras, Rozhdestvensky, Klemperer, Steinberg, Busch, Monteux, Abravanel, Walter, Kubelik, Fricsay, Harnoncourt, Munch. They are truly inside the music, and with the exception only of Kubelik, they do it by allowing enormous freedom within a very strict framework--which Munch also lets go of pretty often... Their formidable technical control exists to empower the musicians to express with 100 percent commitment and no little imagination. This is the ultimate difference between them and the slick, smoothened, excessively loud aesthetic of Karajan and the progeny who go to such lengths to emulate him. One wants to dominate us, the other wants to empower us.

More lists, I know, but I'll come back to this to make a much larger point.)

Based on five more years listening, let me redo this list of underrated non-star conductors. Slightly different, perspectives evolving, some left off because I haven't heard much of them since five years ago, some left off because I have come to feel differently about their musicmaking:

Maestrissimi: (I. Fischer, K. Petrenko)

Markus Stenz

Michael Schonwandt (full disclosure: a friend)

Gabor Takacs-Nagy (it can help to have already mastered a different aspect of music before conducting)

Heinz Holliger

Eliahu Inbal

Young and soon to be at the peak:

Roberto Gonzalez-Monjas 

Courtney Lewis

Marie Jacquot 

Tung Chieh Chuang

Hossein Pishkar

Christian Reif

Delyana Lazarova

Nir Venditti

Ryan Bancroft

Arianne Matiakh

Maestri: (P. Jarvi, Pappano)

Juanjo Mena

Joanne Faletta

Cornelius Meister

Antonello Manacorda

Simone Young

Tugan Sokhiev

Hannu Lintu

Markus Poschner

Marc Albrecht

Thierry Fischer

Roberto Abbado

Great but too zen: (Bychkov, Hrusa, MGT)

:  

Ken-David Masur 

Juraj Valcuha 

Krysztopf Urbanski 

Jonathan Nott

Stephane Deneve

Rune Bergmann 

Andrey Boreyko

Real Music but Too Zen: 

Sakari Oramo

Mikko Franck

Giacomo Sagripanti

Great but too loose: (Rattle)

Neeme Jarvi 

Thomas Hengelbrock

Fabien Gabel 

Donald Runnicles

Real Music but too loose:

Matthias Pintscher

Dalia Stasevska

Marcus Bosch

Yan Pascal Tortelier

Christoph Konig

Great but Too Driven: (Honeck)

Adam Fischer

Han-Nan Chang

Great but Too Tight: (Chailly)

Osmo Vanska

Kees Bakels

Cristian Macelaru

Thomas Dausgaard

David Zinman

Real Music but Too Tight:

Jukka-Pekka Saraste

David Dansmayr

Oksana Lyniv

Kristiina Poska

Great but too dark: (we haven't had a true great of this type since Sanderling)

John Storgards

Mark Elder

Real Music but too dark:

Mark Wigglesworth

Claus Peter Flor

Great but too light: (think YNS but... good)

Ingo Metzmacher

Hartmut Haenchen

Joana Mallwitz

Great but too gentle: (late Abbado)

Thomas Sondergard

True Maestros in spite of any flaws:

Adam Fischer

Kees Bakels

Jonathan Nott

Neeme Jarvi 

Thomas Hengelbrock

Osmo Vanska

John Storgards

Mark Elder

Ingo Metzmacher

Hartmut Haenchen

Underrated Classical Music - Most Prokofiev - but....

With some composers you know your dislike is their fault not yours. With Prokofiev, you know it's your fault. The vision is so clear, so distinctive, so incapable of being any but Prokofiev's. This is music of the highest conceivable genius, exciting beyond anything in the world, potentially greater than any of his time save Shostakovich, and yet I just can't warm to it.

Why?

It comes down to two things. Prokofiev, to the end of his days, was a child. His music is either an adolescent thrill ride devilish shocks, or full of child-like innocence. Unlike Shostakovich, who looks at the world so head on, there is very little emotional maturity present in Prokofiev.

It's not the worst trait to have, but it does take on some very dark qualities. When I hear Shostakovich, it's impossible not to hear the horrors and suffering of millions, their consolations, their communities and communion, their hopes. But when I hear Prokofiev, it's the world of Sovietism at the creation, when people were naively taken in by an ideology they should have known better about. I hear the militance, I hear the almost gleeful willingness under utopian delusions to shoot and starve millions. So perhaps it's my own fault for reading too much into his music, but I often find Prokofiev a deeply unpleasant experience.

Whereas Shostakovich deliberately made his required Soviet ceremonial work bad, Prokofiev made the dubious decision to take it seriously. It's the natural consequence of Prokofiev's worldview - he returned to the Soviet Union because he was too naive to realize the Soviets would never fulfill their promise of creative control, and believed if he kowtowed to the Soviets, they would treat him like the royalty he believed his genius was owed while treating a hundred million other citizens like dirt.

Prokofiev was a genius, but his daemon was a demon, and his music is the aesthetic result of his uncompassionate spirit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5Z8Bq35d0k

A Brief Note on Why I Stopped Playing Popular Genres

Part of why I left popular music and why I never responded to it in the way most people I'm friends with do is because it is clearly one of the most balkanizing, corrosive forces in modern life. Today's music ruins our social fabric rather than building it. If you want to understand how modern American life is so polarized, look at music before anything else. It separates us by geography, by generation, by demographic, by income disparity, no one in America knows any longer how to appreciate each other or talk to each other, and that process begins and ends with music. Everybody belongs to a musical niche, and the bubble it provides makes it increasingly difficult every year to absorb influences within the wider world of music, and the musicians who do can often barely get a following and what they can do has severe financial limitations. All anybody has in common is the most simplified, corporatized pop music, which is guaranteed to expose no one to anything new, and thus every interesting musical movement in popular culture seems to die out the moment after they create something of value because they so often don't know where to look if they want to learn something new and grow as artists. Jazz is better in this regard, because as musicians of such skill, they learned from us. But if other sorts of popular genre'd musicians want to understand how to build on their achievements, they need to accumulate more technical knowledge, and we can provide it for them. People will no doubt argue that it's already happening,  but it's only a pebble in the pool compared to what it could and should be. 

The world of music before 1970 was very very different. Classical musicians were suffused with new grist or the mill by popular music, popular musicians were suffused by classical techniques to a level well past what it is now.  For fifty years, the lives of American musicians have gotten more and more difficult, financially, spiritually, musically, socially, and prestige-wise, and it will take at very least another fifty years in America before people find a way to get anything like that knowledge back which the American music world had and shared with each other before 1970. Those two processes are incredibly interlinked, and the freedom of today's musical world comes at the most colossal price. Look at the superdepression of artists in today's world of pandemic, there is no examining it without realizing that there is a reason we have been hit on a level so few other jobs have. We are not important to people - everybody has their very few musicians and artists whom they cherish, but no niche can financially subsist without a wider financial pool from which to draw. Because there is no common ground, there is no synergy, and so little work to go around. The way to put a stop is deceptively simple, there has to be a more disciplined dialogue in which musicians rigorously keep up with all the latest developments in every genre, and when more connections across barriers are made, there are more financial opportunities. This has to happen, or else we are all going to die together. 

Underrated Classical Musicians: Walter Piston

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9zhjOnhMFY

Some books are so wonderful that they make you cry. One book which made me cry was Walter Piston's book on harmony....

I could write a whole memoir about harmony class at American University under a professor I termed 'Professor Beckmesser', but instead, I'll just leave Walter Piston's Fourth Symphony. Even if it's not as memorable as other nor'easter's like Ives or Copland at his best, what an engaging and magnificently made piece of music this is. Piston, like Hindemith, may or may not have been a truly great artist burning with something essential to say, but he certainly knew how to write good music, and the result is compulsively listenable. It sounds like Copland, and yet sounds utterly unlike him. Piston was an Italian-American (Pistone) born in Maine and raised in Boston. He trained to be both an engineer and an artist before he settled upon music (is it too much to interpolate that you can hear the influence of both trainings in his writing?), where he later became chair of the music department at Harvard and taught 25% of the American composers we've ever heard of. The second movement is certainly a kind of masterpiece: it sounds like Dave Brubeck transcribed his Unsquare Dance for orchestra - though the Piston pre-dates Brubeck by nearly ten years. The fourth movement, while clearly having some influence from Vaughan-Williams's 4th Symphony (RVW at his most barnburning), it also clearly shows where our contemporary former New Englander, John Adams, got some of his orchestration tricks (think of Short Ride in a Fast Machine), but this is a lot more rhythmically complex....

Is Piston a great composer? Probably not, and not only is it not great, but Piston was the epitome of the American musical establishment which shut out composers of less technique but great vision out of the pantheon: Cowell, Ives, Gershwin, Nancarrow, Revueltas, Antheill, Partch, Seeger, Harrison, Ruggles, Ornstein, McPhee... that's the real American canon of visionaries during that period - Copland and Gould can stay tho....

But not everything needs to be great enough to shit gold. Just like we go to the movies, catch a good movie and come home satisfied even if we forget the experience, there are at least a thousand or two composers in music history who knew how to write really, really good music. If it isn't great? Well, we can't always engorge at the trough of greatness. Sometimes we need a break and just to be entertained. If that's what Walter Piston does, then he deserves to still be championed just as all those other really good mid-century academic composers do. I'd rather listen to Cowell or Nancarrow, but Piston, that lettered academic in extremis, is the perfect composer to listen to while shutting off your brain.

Which Conductor Should The Baltimore Symphony Should Appoint

If there's anybody affiliated with the Baltimore Symphony reading this.

It really is a shit season coming up, with depressingly small-time names being vetted to be the new BSO Music Director, which tells us just how dire the financial situation is... Nevertheless, from going small-time there are some very promising names. Here's a guide to whom among this year's guests and the regular guests that should be considered.

I do not know the orchestra's priorities, though I can surmise, this is merely from a Baltimore listener, composer, musical savant, and regular attendee with a lifelong passion for orchestral music. This is based on no consideration but performance. Here is a list of whom I believe you should look at in order of seriousness. Given the number of names, the listening I've done is obviously not very deep. A few minutes each on youtube. Any musician who knows the orchestral literature well should know the major trouble spots and passages to gauge how much extra detail and character a conductor can convey. Many orchestral musicians say they can gauge a conductor's ability in fifteen seconds. I would not put my eye and ear at fifteen seconds, but if you once a week every week for years and are musical, the attentive listener can easily gauge a conductor's ability in only a few minutes. So without further ado...

Ideal: Markus Stenz - he's the best conductor in the world and I have no idea how Baltimore got him to come three times a year. Hearing him was like discovering a Carlos Kleiber with twenty times the repertoire. I know he won't take it, but offer him everything. Complete creative control, more money than god, just get him to reconsider.

Great Choices:

Ken-David Masur

Rune Bergmann

Ryan Bancroft

Andrey Boreyko (disclosure: an acquaintance)

Michael Francis

Christian Macelaru

Cornelius Meister

David Dansmayr (if he runs afoul in Portland)

Really Good Choices:

Juanjo Mena (however demanding)

Hannu Lintu

Jun Märkl

Jakub Hrusa (probably too big)

John Storgards

Joshua Weilerstein

Carlos Kalmar (however demanding)

Good Choices:

Dalia Stasevska

Mario Venzago (for stopgap contracts if something happens with Conlon)

Andrew Davis (ditto)

Robert Trevino

Christoph König

Christian Reif

Gemma New (disclosure: friend of friends)

Decent Choices

James Conlon

Peter Oundjian

Dima Slobodeniouk

Vasily Petrenko (he's probably too big anyway)

Michael Stern

Thomas Dausgaard (he's much too busy...)

You Can Do Better:

Jonathan Hayward

Kirill Karabits

Kwame Ryan

Matthias Pintscher

Ruth Reinhardt

I'd Advise People to Cancel Their Subscription:

Kevin-John Edusei

Eun Sun Kim

-------------------------------------------------------------

Never Came To Baltimore Names That Absolutely Should Be Considered:

Miguel Harth-Bedoya

Joanna Mallwitz

Tito Muńoz

Omer Meir Wellber

Ben Gernon

Daniel Raiskin

Dmitri Jurowski

Carlos Izcaray

Gabor Takacs-Nagy

Claus Peter Flor

Frederic Chaslin

Kristjan Järvi

Marcus Bosch

Michael Schønwandt

Names That Should Be Considered

William Eddins

Alexandre Bloch

Jamie Martin

Steven Mercurio

Jukka-Pekka Saraste

Joanne Faletta

Mark Wigglesworth

Oleg Caetani

Lorenzo Viotti

Aleksandar Marković

Names That Probably Should Be Considered:

Ha-Nan Chang

Wayne Marshall

Carolyn Kuan

Xian Zhang

Emanuelle Villaume

Nicholas Collon

David Afkham

Gerry Walker

Thierry Fischer

Absolutely Should Be Considered Names I Need to Disclose:

Alexander Walker (a friend)

Courtney Lewis (acquaintance of a musically expert good friend)

Theodore Kuchar (an acquaintance)

Dan Ettinger (friend of a musically expert good friend)

Note: 75% of celebrity conductors are not as good as their reputations, and most of the best conductors in the world are barely known. The first group above is a list conductors who should be celebrity conductors and better than most of them. The second group is conductors who should be much better known. The third should be better known at very least.

Here is a list of whom I believe are surely sixteen of the world's most underrated conductors still of music director age:

Markus Stenz

Hannu Lintu

John Storgards

Miguel Harth-Bedoya

Rune Bergmann

Roberto Gonzalez-Monjas

Joanna Mallwitz

Tito Muńoz

Andrey Boreyko

Omer Meir Wellber

Ben Gernon

Daniel Raiskin

Antonello Manacorda

Dmitri Jurowski

Carlos Izcaray

Gabor Takacs-Nagy

And a list of ten perhaps just barely less so and maybe just as good:

Courtney Lewis

Frederic Chaslin

Kristjian Jarvi

Marcus Bosch

Marc Albrecht

Ryan Bancroft

Cornelius Meister

Joshua Weilerstein

Michael Schonwandt

Claus Peter Flor

Keep an eye out too for extremely skilled but musicians who just have to work out a few issues and therefore still might reach that level of transcendent musicianship:

Christoph Konig

Alexander Bloch

Steven Mercurio

Jamie Martin

Aleksandar Markovic

Juanjo Mena

Jun Markl

Robert Trevino

Carlos Kalmar

Jukka-Pekka Saraste

Joanne Faletta

Mark Wigglesworth

David Dansmayr

I truly believe there are still great conductors all around us, they just never get noticed on the big time and there are so many orchestras that the regional ones often perform better than the major ones, but in many countries nobody shows up and they may all have to fold in a generation. Just like there are still great opera singers, major houses just don't like fat singers anymore and they usually sing in small opera houses where they don't have to strain their voices.

....that seems like a good place to end this post...