Re: New Exciting Conductors

On 09/07/2024 13:26, Herman wrote:
 > We're talking here about Blomstedt, Haitink, Karajan, and that's fine.
 > However surely there are exciting under age 50 conductors we like.
 >
 > Be my guest...
I'm exploring Chailly, but at 71, he's fairly young but not very young anymore, even for a conductor.
At least he is alive.
Most conductors represented in my new 10-level 'Musikstapler' (my old CD cabinet collapsed a few months ago) and in the shoe boxes in my attic are dead. Not barely dead, but definitely thoroughly dead.
Back in the 1990s I had mixed feelings about Chailly.
I culled his Bruckner 4 with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, one of the first CDs I ever bought, and agreed with some others that his Mahler was well executed and refined, but too polished, too smooth, too bright, as it were: 'Mahler in an Armani suit behind the wheel of a Ferrari', as Tony Duggan put it.
But I still have his recording of Symphony No. 7 and like it.
I also have and like his 'Jazz Album' and 'Film Album', both with music by Shostakovich and performed by the Concertgewouw Orchestra.
Recent acquisition: 13 CD box with Chailly's live 'Radio Recordings'
(Q Disk MCCM 97033), released in 2004.
And I ordered his 'Dance Album' (again Shostakovich, by the Philadelphia Orchestra).
--
Roland van Gaalen
The Netherlands