Best Classical Music Conductor

Ten years ago when I still lived near Boston, the Rhode Island Philharmonic was looking for a new music director. One of my best friends is on their Board of Directors. She invited me as her guest to every one of the "Audition" concerts that year, to get my opinion of the candidates; one being Marin. I had the pleasure of meeting her at the reception after the concert. She was one of the top two picks. The other person was hired, and Asian conductor who is now back in China as music director of the Bejing Symphony. At the time the RI Philharmonic would have been one of two or three orchestras Marin was involved with, and I believe the Board wanted someone who would move to Rhode Island and take part in the community. It not for that; if it was based solely on talent, she would have won. ------- Temirkanov and John Lill were fabulous. Lill is British; was Tchaikovsky competition winner in 1970. He usually stays in Europe, so I was not very familiar with him. His bio said he was recently performing in St. Petersburg, so Yuri must have invited him to come to Baltimore.

I will have to go with pure copper for this one.

I would sure like to hear more recordings from from Mariss Jansons, his Tchaikovsky/Chandos symphony series came out of nowhere and remains the reference for these works. His Mahler 2 is quite good, and he has some excellent Dvorak recordings. Like Carlos Klieber, we need to hear much more from this very gifted conductor. It would help if he landed major conducting post like Salonen did in LA.

I believe Jansons is in Pittsburg. So was Tilson Thomas and Andre Previn, so this is a good group.

This is an extremely difficult question to answer; it is very dependent upon what is being played. As an example, I think Karajan's 1962 recording of Beethoven's 9th is superb; however, conducting the 6th he sounds like he's in a hurry to get to his next recording. Carl Bohm does a superb 6th, but messes up on the 5th (no teeth). I heard Kurt Sanderling (with Radu Lupu) do a wonderful job on Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto, live, but his recording of Beethoven's 6th is a sleeper. SO, back to my original statement....depends upon the piece of music.