You already know anything i will say if i read your posts...
But thanks to ask...
All interprets or composers need our understanding... And each of us may discover any moment or may discover any interpreter in musical history according to the many threasholds we had already pass by ourselves in our own consciousness evolution and in our own musical knowledge and experience...
At the time i was a young i will never had understood Celibidache...
He use the two dimensions of musical time, the vertical pulsative one and the metronomical melodical horizontal one as Furtwangler did to reveal the intrinsic transcendance of musical time over physical time...
But their two ways differ a lot...
As Toscanini but in a different way than T. who subordinate completely , by imposition, in some way music music vertical dimension to metronomical time; C. without breaking the relation between the two dimensions of time in a way separate them bit to reveal in his own way the transcendance of musical time, but where Furt. use vertical pulsative dimension to let the melodical horizontal time to happen as if coming from the vertical as his true origin , C. like T. impose, but in a complete reverse way that T., he impose the melodic horizontal time to go back to his source in the vertical dimension as his true destination ...To do this he must slow the metronomical time dimension ( this explain why i spoke about the way C,. separate the two dimensions first because this slowing tempo IS THE SEPARATION i spoke about ) ...
Then for me, F. and C’ they are among the greatest maestros ever , because F. and C. complement one another in opposite way but without negating or erasing the transcendance of vertical pulsative time over or for the benefit of the metronomical time dimension, as Toscanini did...
Read me right i did not claim that T. is not a great maestro in his own way, he did supreme direction , he is one of the greatest maestro who ever live but he stay on a road which will never travelled so far again as he did by anyone... Because T. was using his will to bend music to his personnality , In this he was the ULTIMATE MESTRO , he did this instead of putting his personnality and will at the service of music in a more humble way as F. and C. did after him .. I hope i am clear...I try to describe these maestros here i dont claim superiority for one or the other...
With T. we are always in a musical experience that stay in time so astonishlingly dynamical and hypnotizing it is and it is mesmerizing; but with F. and C. we go more for eternity in a contemplative way...
If the works "sings" with F. it "speaks" poetically more than sings with C.
Now take that with a grain of salt... I try to describe in conepts my own experience with them... I had no serious knowledge in music and i am not a musician at all...
I describe in words my felt experience... I am interested by the concept of musical dual time experience , there is two directions of time in music , and in the physical world there is only one...
Music express something so deep that our science even only begins to grasp it as in the works of mathematician Alain Connes..
By the way these three maestros, C. F. and T. are the three most characteristical maestro if we analyse them with time dual dimensions as methodological concepts to understand them... This does not means that the other great maestros are less genius or less great... Not at all... But no other meastro illustrate better than C. with his slow direction , or as F. with his internal singing direction or as T. with the way he bent music to his will , no other so great tghey are go to the same extreme with always the exact same motivation consistently and always in the same way ...
All other maestro are more imprevisible or variable or flexible , and more complicate or less characteristical when we compare them together with the prism of the TIME dual dimensions and the way these dimensions interact internally and externally...All other maestro combine some aspect of these three directions in some mix unique recipe.... Ansermet is not Bernstein, and Giulini is not Klemperer... There is something of C. and T. in Klemperer more than of F. ...But here music is so complex that any formula will appear artificial... Human personnality is not an equation... But three great maestros because of their own personalities succeeded to isolate a particular road and way of being "musical" in relation with time and they succeeded in revealing to us ONE priviligied asopects in a way we can grasp it for its own sake... ...Thats is my point..
So how do you regard the art of Celibidache? Another artist famous for going his own way, for conceiving of music as statements, rather than a series of notes?