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PERFORMERS AND PERFORMANCE The Virtuoso Conductors. By Raymond Holden. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. [x, 370 p. ISBN0-300-09326-8. $35.] Index, bibliographic citations, photographs.
As the demographic age of those attending orchestral concerts continues to rise in the United States, some critics make the argument that symphony orchestras in this country are like musical museums performing works primarily from the mid- to late-nineteenth-century musical canon and, as such, will eventually just whither away as audiences and financial support dies. Despite these dire predictions of the demise of "classical music," conductors still hold the world stage as the superstars of the orchestral world, flitting from one engagement to another, or acting as the music director of several orchestras at one time. The field is international: a British subject, Simon Rattle, conducts the Berlin Philharmonic; James Levine, an American, holds the baton in Munich and Bayreuth; and Seiji Ozawa regularly conducts the Vienna Philharmonic. Acting as the music director for a major orchestra is no longer dominated, as it was for about 150 years, by conductors rising though the ranks of the small orchestras in Germany, Austria, and the other countries of the former Austro-Hungarian empire.
Raymond Holden in The Virtuoso Conductors describes the "dominant role, homogeneity of approach, their sense of purpose and their unique relationship with the music they performed" (p. 1) of nine conductors from the Central European region whose lives spanned the period from the mid-nineteenth century through the late twentieth century. Their contemporaries, the aficionados of Western music, held these nine in high esteem, and they helped to solidify the musical canon which forms the basis of today's orchestra repertoire. Holden anoints Richard Wagner as the Zukunftdirigent who blazed the trail for these nine to follow: Hans von Bulow, Arthur Nikisch, Gustav Mahler, Felix Weingartner, Richard Strauss, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Herbert von Karajan. The basics of their biographical details are similar....