Word: ngler
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...musical professions, conductors tend to reach their peak in later years, after acquiring the life experience and authority to mine the deepest riches of an orchestra. None of which bothers Harding. "It is an older man's game," he concedes. "But the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler made his debut at 19, so there are exceptions!" Harding is making his own rules. As a young teenager in Oxford he would conduct groups of friends on weekends. Artistically ambitious, he decided to try a rare piece by Schönberg, but found it so difficult he sought help from...
Second movement: Adagio. Berlin, 1945. The capital of the Third Reich lies in rubble. So does the Berlin Philharmonic; the orchestra's conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, has been banned from performing until he can prove himself innocent of being a Nazi sympathizer. Onto his podium steps a 33-year-old music, mathematics and philosophy student from Rumania named Sergiu Celibidache. Despite his lack of professional experience, Celibidache more than restores the orchestra's prewar luster. "A baton genius, beyond any doubt," declares one Berlin critic. Only his former teacher at Berlin's Hochschule...
...among them Strauss, Tchaikovsky and Grieg. His successor Arthur Nikisch, who led the Philharmonic from 1895 to 1922, inspired a rapturous comment from the demanding Tchaikovsky. "He doesn't conduct," said the composer. "He seems to surrender himself to some mysterious magic force." Wilhelm Furtwängler instilled in the orchestra a sense of musical adventure, leading mercurial performances that unfolded with an unsurpassed sense of discovery for some 30 years...
...Waart took time off to study cassettes of 35 of the programs he has conducted with the San Francisco. He was not happy. Says he: "The music sounded like a rehearsal. In preparation you listen and correct, but you must shut all that off in performance. Furtwängler and Walter made a lot of mistakes, but what does it matter? Precision is an illness of our time...
...generally thought of as orthodox conductors, interested in Brahms' Brahms rather than their Brahms. Yet how different these interpretations are. Böhm almost seems schizoid about these essentially well-adjusted symphonies, as though he could not make up his mind whether the dreamy, expansive Furtwängler or the lean, surging Toscanini were right. No such problems with Haitink. His Brahms bristles with muscle and the knowledge of a certain destination...