# Who are you more often impressed by: composers or performers?



## level82rat (Jun 20, 2019)

I’d imagine the response to this would depend on whether you have spent more time performing or composing yourself, but let me know if you falsify that hypothesis.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Well of course both are critical to the success of the work when we listen to it. If I had to choose one, then the composer is of course the prime for his music will last forever if it is of merit.


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## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

When my ears hear 4'33", my brain hears greatness. Solve this riddle and you'll find the truth. (Can ask for hints of course.)


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

At the moment I am most enjoying hearing new (to me) performances/recordings of works I know and love. I'm not interested in ideas about which is the best or in living with just one or two performances so much as hearing more performances that are stimulating and in some way effective. This means not having any idea of how a work _should _go and being open to new insights. I think many listeners would respond well to many recordings I have listened to recently. But there are also other recordings that have excited me but that many would reject as "wrong" or would hear them as merely trying to be different for the sake of it. Some performers do apparently strange things with a familiar piece and yet get widely praised - consider Gould's Beethoven - while others, like Pletnev's Beethoven concertos, that tend to be dismissed. And then there is the universally (it seems) hated Bernstein Enigma Variations, a recording that doesn't displace the usual suspects for me but is still one I love.

At other times I am all for exploring new (to me) repertoire. That tends to lead me to the contemporary these days as I find most Classical and Romantic composers that I am not yet familiar with to be rather dull.

But that's just me and what rocks my boat.


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## BrahmsWasAGreatMelodist (Jan 13, 2019)

I care a lot more about the composition than the performance.
Only a few performances (of standard repertoire) have impressed me enough as performances that I have bothered to take note of the performer's names. But it does happen.

That said, I do like when performers take risks. I guess I (unfairly) tend to think of the performance as something which can either inhibit the expressivity of a work or bring it to life.

Of course in other genres it's often more equal, or the other way around.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

level82rat said:


> Who are you more often impressed by: composers or performers?
> .


Neither, I'm most impressed by listeners, for submitting to the music, allowing their imagination to be excited. The composers and performers are just the means to this end.


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## Kjetil Heggelund (Jan 4, 2016)

Isn't it up to the performer to choose a composer to play? Oh...sometimes a composer chooses a performer...Well, I'm 50/50 I guess.


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## level82rat (Jun 20, 2019)

Kjetil Heggelund said:


> Isn't it up to the performer to choose a composer to play? Oh...sometimes a composer chooses a performer...Well, I'm 50/50 I guess.


Both performing and composing have their own potential for creativity and skill, so which set of skills fascinate you more? A performer simply choosing a composer is not enough to impress anybody


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## Kjetil Heggelund (Jan 4, 2016)

level82rat said:


> Both performing and composing have their own potential for creativity and skill, so which set of skills fascinate you more? A performer simply choosing a composer is not enough to impress anybody


I choose the performer I like the most to play the composer I'd like to hear the most. I'm glad there are many great performers and composers. For my seldom concert experience I go for the coolest looking program, but I will try to learn something about the performer(s) if I don't know who they are already.


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

One of the biggest problems in the classical world is the "star system". We idolize, and pay exorbitant salaries, to a few performers who are just a bit better than the others, or their managers hype them to be. In doing so, we deprive ourselves fine music making from lesser-known performers. The CD era made this clear: look at the large number of excellent orchestras, conductors, violinists and pianists, not to mention composers, on labels specializing in the rare: CPO, Marco Polo, Hyperion...

Some performers really do impress me with their hard-gotten abilities. It still amazes me how anyone can play the solo part for the Rachmaninoff 2nd, Tchaikovsky 1st piano concertos. Conductors who can do an opera without a score. Orchestral violinists who can play the Elgar symphonies. But in the final analysis, it's always the act of composition that impresses me more. If people knew just how hard it is! Forget 4'33''. Read through the scores of Wagner's Ring - it's mind boggling how one man did all this. Or any symphony by Mahler, Beethoven, Brahms...great composers and great works impress me to no end.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Enthusiast said:


> At other times I am all for exploring new (to me) repertoire. That tends to lead me to the contemporary these days as I find most Classical and Romantic composers that I am not yet familiar with to be rather dull.


I always think there should be a separate subforum for people like you


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

At the end of the day, you are listening to the composer and not the performer; but performance is also important up until the moment that music criticism becomes PERFORMANCE criticism. So that after hearing the one zillionth recording of Tchaikovsky's _Violin Concerto_ we take it as a given that the music is so divine that it is beyond criticism; that only a complete infidel or blasphemer would dare criticize it; so now all we left is the performance: Did orchestra and chorus play all the notes right? Were they a little too slow in the slow movement" Too fast in the fast movement? Were the dynamics on-point?

I enjoy Golden-Age classical recordings by the likes of Bernstien, Karajan, Mitropoulos, Szell, Ormandy, Horowitz, Serkin, Arrau, Gould, Hiefetz, Stern, Dietrich Fischer-Diskau, Leontyne Price, Franco Corelli, and a galaxy of others who uncovered the standard repertoire and the warhorses many times over. I like current day performers who play music that is current or music that had been neglected because was too "academic" or "abstract". I love NAXOS for doing that, and other performers who use their powers for good.


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## cheregi (Jul 16, 2020)

Coach G said:


> At the end of the day, you are listening to the composer and not the performer


I have to say I found this a little funny; isn't it absolutely and objectively the other way around?


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

cheregi said:


> I have to say I found this a little funny; isn't it absolutely and objectively the other way around?


Perhaps poor wordsmanship on my part. Maybe I should have said: you are listing _to hear_ the composer. You want to hear something by Bach, or Mozart, or Tchaikovsky. That's the point in going to hear the New York Philharmonic, or Yuja Wang, or Yo-Yo Ma; because they are playing the composers that you like to hear.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

hammeredklavier said:


> I always think there should be a separate subforum for people like you


There used to be more. Perhaps they are all in that subforum in another dimension.


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## cheregi (Jul 16, 2020)

Coach G said:


> you are listing _to hear_ the composer. You want to hear something by Bach, or Mozart, or Tchaikovsky. That's the point in going to hear the New York Philharmonic, or Yuja Wang, or Yo-Yo Ma; because they are playing the composers that you like to hear.


I don't mean to be pedantic, but I do think the fact that contemporary performance practice is at all-time narrowness of acceptable variation can easily obscure the fact that we are _only ever_ hearing a performer, who chooses to make use of information from a composer in a particular way in order to make pleasing music... the attitude of early recorded pianists who, for example, have no qualms with making major on-the-fly departures from the score, for the sake of the flow of performance, seems to me in some vague way 'more honest' in this respect - i.e. there's this default assumption now that a performance is guaranteed to be more enjoyable if the performer follows the notes/instructions exactly, because the assumption is that if something else would've been more enjoyable to hear then the composer would've written something else, but as I see it that's basically pseudoscience... actually this does seem to dovetail with your critique of music criticism vs performance criticism, in that we are both basically criticizing the idea that the composer is beyond reproach!


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

So maybe I'm being a bit misunderstood here and maybe I'm having some trouble expressing myself accurately. So here's a fairly recent review from the New York Times on a recital that featured Yuja Wang who at this moment is considered to be one of the top ten concert pianists in the world.

*Review: Yuja Wang Plays Dazed Chaos, Then 7 Encores*

_By Zachary Woolfe
May 18, 2018

The usual praise for a musician who plays a recital in a big hall is that he or she makes that big hall feel small.

But on Thursday, the pianist Yuja Wang made Carnegie Hall seem even vaster than normal: big, empty, lonely. Through her concert's uncompromisingly grim first half and its wary, stunned second, Ms. Wang charted wholly dark, private emotions. She was in no way hostile toward an adoring (if slightly disoriented) audience, but neither did she seem at all interested in seducing it.

After the playbills had been printed, Ms. Wang - who will have a Perspectives series at Carnegie next season - revised her program. She subtracted two of the four Rachmaninoff preludes she'd planned to give before intermission and added an extra three of his later, even less scrutable Études-Tableaux. Ms. Wang played none of these pieces in a way that made them seem grounded or orderly; she even seemed to want to run the seven together in an unbroken, heady minor-key span, a choice that most - but not enough - of the audience respected by not clapping in between.

Even divided by light applause, these pieces blurred into and stretched toward one another. Doing nothing that felt exaggerated or overwrought, Ms. Wang emphasized unsettled harmonies and de-emphasized melodic integrity. The Étude-Tableau, in E-flat Minor (Op. 33, No. 6) wasn't the juxtaposition of one hand's abstraction and the other's clear etching. No, she was telling two surreal tales at once. The martial opening of the Prelude in G Minor (Op. 23, No. 5) swiftly unraveled into something woozy and bewildering. The washes of sound in the Étude-Tableau in C Minor (Op. 39, No. 1) were set alongside insectlike fingerwork - neurotic, insistent, claustrophobic.

Her bending of the line in the Étude-Tableau in B Minor (Op. 39, No. 4) felt like the turning of a widening gyre, infusing the evocation of aristocratic nostalgia with anxiety. (Rachmaninoff composed most of the works Ms. Wang played as World War I loomed and unfolded, and the 19th century finally ended.) The stretched-out, washed-out quality of melancholy in her account of the Étude-Tableau in C Minor (Op. 33, No. 3), made that sorrow seem more like resignation: The loneliness she depicted felt familiar to her, even comfortable.

The prevailing mood - dreamlike sadness; a feeling of being lost; rushing through darkness - continued in what followed. The relentless trills and tremolos of Scriabin's Sonata No. 10 - which is sometimes played lusciously but was here diffuse and gauzy - glittered angrily. Three Ligeti etudes from the 1980s and '90s proved that Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, as she presented them, were presentiments of the modernism of the distant future.

There was the sense that more time than just 20 minutes - decades, perhaps - had elapsed during intermission, after which Ms. Wang played Prokofiev's Sonata No. 8, composed during World War II. Here, playing with guarded poise, Ms. Wang seemed to inhabit a kind of aftermath of the dazed chaos she had depicted in the early-20th-century works on the first half. The contours were sharper now, the colors brighter and bolder. The effect was still unnerving.

I considered whether Ms. Wang's flamboyant clothes - in the first half, a floor-length purple gown with only a slash of sparkle covering her breasts; in the second, a tiny iridescent turquoise dress with vertiginous heels - were the right costume here. They did give the impression that she had arrived alone, a disconcerting combination of powerful and vulnerable, at a not particularly appealing party. In that sense they were a fitting complement to her ominous vision of this music.

Likewise, it seemed at first that a few of her seven - yes, seven - encores jarred with the forlorn mood she'd built up. Vladimir Horowitz's "Carmen" fantasia, an Art Tatum stride version of "Tea for Two," a demented arrangement of Mozart's "Rondo alla Turca" - all were blazingly performed but had a touch of cheerful kitsch about them. But perhaps they, too, were of a piece with the intoxication that permeated the recital._

*****

So when I read this review I see all the focus being placed on the _performance_ and not the music. Yuja didn't do it this way or didn't do it that way, and it even gets into a ridiculous diversion concerning the clothes she was wearing. Do we dare even THINK that maybe, just maybe, the one zillion recordings we already have by Horowitz, Rubinstein, Ashkanazy, Richter, and Rachmaninoff himself have pretty much said all there is to say when it comes to the music of Rachmaninoff? He criticizes Yuja for playing it different, but what choice is there when the choice of material has already been sucked dry many times over since the 1940s? How about the critic actually reviewing the MUSIC? How about a suggestion that maybe performers like Yuja could use their celebrity status to program works by composers who are among the LIVING like Vivian Fung, Chen Yi, Unsuk Chin, Ellen Taffe Zwillich, Jennifer Higdon, Adolphus Hailstork, or Philip Glass? Or what about a program that delves into the rich history of American classical music to create a program that includes the likes of Gottschalk, MacDowell, Joplin, Ives, Barber, Gershwin, Cowell, Cage, Sessions, Carter; or are Carnegie Hall classical audiences to dense and zombie-like to challenge their brains like that? It sounds to me like what the audience came for was to sit through Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and Prokofiev; oblige the "masters" for the sake of culture, o they could then get to what they REALLY came for: those seven encores! They want to see Yuja play Mozart's _alla Turca_ as fast as possible followed by the _Beer Barrel Polka_. After the concert they'll go someplace and talk about what she was wearing.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

I have always been more interested in the music, i.e the work, and not as much the performance. I've found that I rarely hear a recording in which the performance is so questionable as to detract from the music and conversely have not spent a lot of time searching for "the best" recording of a work. (I can only think of two works for which I've found and listened to as many available recordings as I can find, but those are exceptions that prove the rule.)

So, to answer the OP question, I am more "impressed by" (not my word, I'd have chosen "interested in") composers.


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## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

Mandryka said:


> Neither, I'm most impressed by listeners, for submitting to the music, allowing their imagination to be excited. The composers and performers are just the means to this end.


I'm at the opposite end. Composers are first, performers a couple of steps below, and listeners way down the line.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Here's a similar topic:



Jacck said:


> I don't give a damn about conductors. I have not yet understood the adulation they receive. In my mind, the composer is the creator of the music. Conductor is just a sophisticated gramophone to play the music.
> 
> 
> hammeredklavier said:
> ...





MatthewWeflen said:


> Sure. In the same way Directors don't matter to movies or Coaches don't matter to sports teams.
> 
> 
> hammeredklavier said:
> ...


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

If Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Handel and Haydn are alive today, I would be *equally* impressed to hear them perform their own music.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Enthusiast said:


> There used to be more. Perhaps they are all in that subforum in another dimension.


It's what happened with MR. During his final days, he was "pushed" more and more to the subforums (such as the one for religion and politics) until he finally got banished to the 4th dimension.


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## level82rat (Jun 20, 2019)

Coach G said:


> but what choice is there when the choice of material has already been sucked dry many times over since the 1940s?


You can be amazed by something even if it's not revolutionary in the grand scheme of things. For example, if you're a second year violin student, watching someone do even a decent job at playing Wienawski will leave you speechless


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## cheregi (Jul 16, 2020)

Coach G said:


> So when I read this review I see all the focus being placed on the _performance_ and not the music. Yuja didn't do it this way or didn't do it that way, and it even gets into a ridiculous diversion concerning the clothes she was wearing. Do we dare even THINK that maybe, just maybe, the one zillion recordings we already have by Horowitz, Rubinstein, Ashkanazy, Richter, and Rachmaninoff himself have pretty much said all there is to say when it comes to the music of Rachmaninoff? He criticizes Yuja for playing it different, but what choice is there when the choice of material has already been sucked dry many times over since the 1940s? How about the critic actually reviewing the MUSIC? How about a suggestion that maybe performers like Yuja could use their celebrity status to program works by composers who are among the LIVING like Vivian Fung, Chen Yi, Unsuk Chin, Ellen Taffe Zwillich, Jennifer Higdon, Adolphus Hailstork, or Philip Glass? Or what about a program that delves into the rich history of American classical music to create a program that includes the likes of Gottschalk, MacDowell, Joplin, Ives, Barber, Gershwin, Cowell, Cage, Sessions, Carter; or are Carnegie Hall classical audiences to dense and zombie-like to challenge their brains like that? It sounds to me like what the audience came for was to sit through Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, and Prokofiev; oblige the "masters" for the sake of culture, o they could then get to what they REALLY came for: those seven encores! They want to see Yuja play Mozart's _alla Turca_ as fast as possible followed by the _Beer Barrel Polka_. After the concert they'll go someplace and talk about what she was wearing.


I think I didn't bother to explain myself well actually; I almost completely agree with this! Like you, I don't think there's much point in striving for a contrived notion of 'perfection' within an equally contrived notion of 'the classics', we have plenty of recordings for that if we did want to value it highly, and I would welcome a less conservative performance/criticism culture... I'm just pointing out, in support of these ideas, that such a performance culture actually did exist for a long time until the early 20th century: performers were expected to make each performance unique, and judged less on the canonicity of the pieces they chose than on the sheer musical pleasure they induced in their audiences... another way to look at it is, I would love to see more under-the-radar works programmed, and I would love to see more canonical works played in interesting/new ways a la the Alla Turca, _and_ I would also love to see performers unafraid to play canonical works with extensive ornamentation, actively improvising departures from the score per their whims, new approaches to structure that disregard marked tempo and dynamics, etc...

It occurs to me actually that you may be all in favor of programming under-the-radar composers but much less excited by the idea of playing canonical works in different/new ways... in which case, I disagree, on the basis that those two ideas aren't fundamentally all that different, and either way interesting and exciting music is the result.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

hammeredklavier said:


> It's what happened with MR. During his final days, he was "pushed" more and more to the subforums (such as the one for religion and politics) until he finally got banished to the 4th dimension.


Oh, I had thought you were joking.

I don't want to attack MR or anyone else but I will say that I often disagreed with his posts and found many bizarre. But I don't think he did any harm (aside, perhaps, from his tiresome spats with Woodduck) and sometimes he did post material that was interesting and worthwhile. He opened my ears to some wonderful music that I would not otherwise have found.

More importantly there have been many serious and knowledgeable people with an openness to the contemporary here who have disappeared (and some were obviously chased off or found the constant negative attention tedious). I like this forum but it does have a rather ugly side. It is surely a feature of maturity in a community that it can engage with and welcome variety and diversity.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

SanAntone said:


> I have always been more interested in the music, i.e the work, and not as much the performance. I've found that I rarely hear a recording in which the performance is so questionable as to detract from the music and conversely have not spent a lot of time searching for "the best" recording of a work. (I can only think of two works for which I've found and listened to as many available recordings as I can find, but those are exceptions that prove the rule.)
> 
> So, to answer the OP question, I am more "impressed by" (not my word, I'd have chosen "interested in") composers.


Same with me. First the composer's piece, then, often by happenstance, finding a performance that enhances it better than some other performance. But early imprinting upon the listener of a first hearing often controls later preferences. I regard myself as fortunate in first hearing the two Ravel PCs as performed by Samson Francois and Andre Cluytens on an EMI/Angel LP. I wore it out over the years, and then spent years trying to find another performance that suited me as well. I was delighted, therefore, when EMI/Angel reissued the recording as a CD. Many other examples.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

hammeredklavier said:


> It's what happened with MR. During his final days, he was "pushed" more and more to the subforums (such as the one for religion and politics) until he finally got banished to the 4th dimension.


This is not accurate. As a denizen of the Religion and Politics Groups, I can attest that mr had very little presence there. True that he created (yet another) "vanity" Group near the end, stillborn like so many other attempts, but overall he was not a force downstairs,


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## SixFootScowl (Oct 17, 2011)

Composers for Orchestral works. 

Composers and performers (singers, to be exact) for opera.

While I did not mention the musicians that put it all together by making the music, they certainly are impressive since I probably can't make coherent sounds on any musical instrument beyond a kazoo. But they can more blend in to the whole, were singers in opera tend to stand out significantly.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Usually I'm more impressed by the composers, but in the case of Brahms' and Tchaikovsky's symphonies, I think I'm more impressed by the conductor to pull it off.


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## level82rat (Jun 20, 2019)

Phil loves classical said:


> Usually I'm more impressed by the composers, but in the case of Brahms' and Tchaikovsky's symphonies, I think I'm more impressed by the conductor to pull it off.


What makes these symphonies so hard to conduct?


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

level82rat said:


> What makes these symphonies so hard to conduct?


I just heard from Haitink or someone that Brahms' 3rd is especially hard to pull off. I'm thinking with an orchestra, there are more moving parts, and only following the score only can make the music lifeless and dull. My own wild speculation: orchestral music like Rite of Spring and afterwards in the 20th Century, has as lot of gestures written into the scores, and the score more accurately reflects what is in the composer's head. Maybe someone with experience can confirm or refute that.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

cheregi said:


> I think I didn't bother to explain myself well actually; I almost completely agree with this! Like you, I don't think there's much point in striving for a contrived notion of 'perfection' within an equally contrived notion of 'the classics', we have plenty of recordings for that if we did want to value it highly, and I would welcome a less conservative performance/criticism culture... I'm just pointing out, in support of these ideas, that such a performance culture actually did exist for a long time until the early 20th century: performers were expected to make each performance unique, and judged less on the canonicity of the pieces they chose than on the sheer musical pleasure they induced in their audiences... another way to look at it is, I would love to see more under-the-radar works programmed, and I would love to see more canonical works played in interesting/new ways a la the Alla Turca, _and_ I would also love to see performers unafraid to play canonical works with extensive ornamentation, actively improvising departures from the score per their whims, new approaches to structure that disregard marked tempo and dynamics, etc...
> 
> It occurs to me actually that you may be all in favor of programming under-the-radar composers but much less excited by the idea of playing canonical works in different/new ways... in which case, I disagree, on the basis that those two ideas aren't fundamentally all that different, and either way interesting and exciting music is the result.


I would like to see contemporary composers programmed frequently, not just as an obligation for the sake of "culture", but as the main event. And I'd like to see American orchestras, performers, and concert halls pay tribute to our own rich and diverse American classical music heritage. I think the big names, the classical music celebrities should use their powers for good. If they want to play the standard repertoire they really should only do it if they can find a sincere way to do so that brings something new to say. Glenn Gould did that and was highly criticized for it. Sergiu Celibidace found a new way to conduct Bruckner. In Bernstein's later years he found a new way to conduct the warhorses, slowing down the tempos and extracting every morsel of goodness from each note. Sometimes it worked, as in the Sibelius _Symphonies # 1, 2,5 & 7_ as well as the Tchaikovsky _Symphony #6_; Sometimes it didn't as with the infamous Berlin Wall _Symphony #9_ "gala" event. Other times, it wasn't too bad but not very impressive , either; as with Bernstein's DG recordings of the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies. But at least Bernstein was looking for something new to say.

I also think that Pierre Boulez was good, not because he was my favorite conductor (I actually find him somewhat too cool and intellectual); but because he used his star power to record Schoenberg, Varese, Berio, and Messiean; and not just in an obligatory way the way most conductors of his times did with the inevitable _Schoenberg/Berg/Webern_ record that they expected nobody to buy, but in a way where he really seemed to care about the music with multiple recordings of those composers and others that demonstrated a generous sampling of their musical visions.


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