Yet he just wouldn’t do it at least, not very often. When conducting a concert-his eyes afire, smiling at the orchestra, his right arm slashing through the air-he seems to be enjoying himself as much as, say, Leonard Bernstein (there are excerpts of Kleiber conducting Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms in concert on YouTube). Standing before an orchestra, Kleiber, who was exceptionally handsome, with an eagle-like gaze and great long arms, was in absolute command (see the rehearsal footage of him in the moving documentary “Carlos Kleiber: Traces to Nowhere”). He made only a handful of orchestral and operatic recordings-not much activity for a man who lived to the age of seventy-four. According to one of his fans, Kleiber conducted just ninety-six concerts and around four hundred operatic performances. Carlos Kleiber, Vienna Philharmonic (DG). His recordings of the Brahms symphonies made in concert with the Berlin Philharmonic in the late forties and early fifties (EMI) are full of imperfections, but they make you say, again and again, “So that’s what that phrase was about-I never quite got that before.” For the listener, the result is amazement and rapture, and when the great moments come, the orchestra is there for him, with shattering power.īeethoven: Symphonies No. He had a hard-to-follow, nearly circular beat, which nevertheless produced a flow of music in which tension and relaxation electrify the meaning and emotional significance of the music.

Furtwängler bent phrases, extended climaxes, caressed lyrical passages-he went beyond the score in ways that most conductors would no longer dare. Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954) is widely considered the one of the greatest-if not the very greatest-conductors of the twentieth century, and most of the recordings we have of Furtwängler were made at live performances and could hardly be described as perfect.

Spirit, power, phrasing, tempo, expressiveness-all these things matter more than note-perfect execution. I don’t know that perfection is of the greatest importance in music-making.

Realitone screaming trumpet torrent