The longest serving conductors on earth
mainThe death of Lorin Maazel deprives us of a maestro who held the podium for more than 70 years. Earlier this year, we lost Claudio Abbado and Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos.
The conductor Paul Mauffray wondered quite naturally whether this left room at the top.
So he drew up a little list. What it shows is that there are plenty of well-known conductors still active in their 80s ad 70s. It’s when you get to the 60s that the field thins out.
Here’s Paul’s list for www.slippedisc.com. Who has he forgotten?
Longest serving conductors
Anton Coppola 1917
Stanisław Skrowaczewski 1923
Sir Neville Marriner 1924
Georges Prêtre 1924
Pierre Boulez 1925
Herbert Blomstedt 1927
Michael Gielen 1927
Raymond Leppard 1927
Kurt Masur 1927
Christoph von Dohnányi 1929
Bernard Haitink 1929
Nikolaus Harnoncourt 1929
André Previn 1929
Richard Bonynge 1930
Günther Herbig 1931
Gennady Rozhdestvensky 1931
Nello Santi 1931
Vladimir Fedoseyev 1932
Libor Pešek 1933
Michel Plasson 1933
Helmuth Rilling 1933
Frans Brüggen 1934
Philippe Entremont 1934
Roger Norrington 1934
Leopold Hager 1935
Jorge Mester 1935
Seiji Ozawa 1935
Charles Dutoit 1936
Eliahu Inbal 1936
Zdeněk Mácal 1936
Zubin Mehta 1936
David Zinman 1936
Vladimir Ashkenazy 1937
Neeme Jarvi 1937
Maxim Shostakovich 1938
Yuri Temirkanov 1938
Steuart Bedford 1939
Marek Janowski 1939
Peter Schneider 1939
Walter Weller 1939
Jesús López-Cobos 1940
Christoph Eschenbach 1940
Dmitrij Kitajenko 1940
Lawrence Foster 1941
Christopher Hogwood 1941
Riccardo Muti 1941
John Nelson 1941
Yuri Simonov 1941
Edo de Waart 1941
Daniel Barenboim 1942
Thomas Sanderling 1942
Christopher Seaman 1942
Lothar Zagrosek 1942
Bruno Campanella 1943
John Eliot Gardiner 1943
Hartmut Haenchen 1943
Mariss Jansons 1943
James Levine 1943
Jeffrey Tate 1943
David Atherton 1944
Sir Andrew Davis 1944
Dennis Russell Davies 1944
Peter Eötvös 1944
Ton Koopman 1944
Leif Segerstam 1944
Leonard Slatkin 1944
Michael Tilson Thomas 1944
Antoni Wit 1944
Gianluigi Gelmetti 1945
Michail Jurowski 1945
Gustav Kuhn 1945
John Mauceri 1945
Pinchas Steinberg 1945
Jiří Bělohlávek 1946
Trevor Pinnock 1946
Christof Prick 1946
Mark Elder 1947
Philippe Herreweghe 1947
Gerard Schwarz 1947
Yan Pascal Tortelier 1947
Sylvain Cambreling 1948
Stewart Robertson 1948
Mario Venzago 1948
Ádám Fischer 1949
Hans Graf 1949
James Judd 1949
Stefan Soltesz 1949
Bruno Weil 1949
James Conlon 1950
What a great pity Skrowaczewski is not appearing at the Proms this year, to end his 90th birthday season. His Bruckner 3 with the LPO earlier this year was very special indeed. And he’s not conducted at the Proms since 1996.
Gunther Schuller, 1925.
Leonid Grin, 1947
Günter Neuhold, 1947
What a fantastic list by Paul Mauffray. It’s reassuring to know that there are still plenty of old lions (and middle aged lions) still with us.
As to additions, I guess 1950 was the cut off date because Ivan Fisher (absent) was born 1951.
That’s Ivan FISCHER. Sorry.
Maestro Jonathan Sternberg was born in 1919, though I don’t think he’s still actively conducting. He did however do that until a few years ago.
Sorry, one more comes to mind: Matthias Bamert, 1942
Jorma Panula 1930
Pinchas Zuckerman, 1948, though we probably first think of him as a violinist.
William Christie (1944), Vassily Sinaisky (1947).
I really shouldn’t have started this, because of course I couldn’t stop. I did wonder whether the list of 60-somethings looked a bit thin because early-music specialists were slightly underrepresented in Mr Mauffray’s list, and I think my list of additions below perhaps proves this true. What worries me most, of course, is that I still think of several of these as young conductors…
Louis Fremaux 1921
Martin Turnovsky 1928
Joerg Faerber 1929
Hans Stadlmair 1929
Harold Farberman 1929
Rudolf Bibl 1929
Hans-Martin Schneidt 1930
Kasimierz Kord 1930
James Loughran 1931
Antoni Ros-Marba 1931
Tamas Vasary 1933
David Lloyd-Jones 1934
Jerzy Maksymiuk 1936
Theodor Guschlbauer 1939
Jean-Claude Malgoire 1940
Alain Lombard 1940
Uri Segal 1941
Jacques Delacote 1942
Owain Arwel Hughes 1942
Kenneth Montgomery 1943
Alun Francis 1943
Joshua Rifkin 1944
Nicholas Kraemer 1945
Martin Pearlman 1945
Okko Kamu 1946
Dirk Joeres 1947
Alexander Anissimov 1947
Andre Parrott 1947
Alexander Rahbari 1948
Barry Wordsworth 1948
Hubert Soudant 1948
Marc Soustrot 1949
Jane Glover 1949
Nicholas McGegan 1950
Philip Pickett 1950
I believe Pierino Gamba, born in 1936, is still living and active. His LSO recordings of Rossini overtures and Beethoven piano concertos (with Julius Katchen) remain in the Decca catalogue.
wow!
Although primarly a composer(the same goes for Gunther Schuller),John Williams,of course(born 1932).
While I appreciate the attempt, the list is quite misleading. Longest serving conductors implies a number of years of active work as a conductor. Using birth dates merely tells us how old people are/were. Let’s make a true list of longest serving conductors beginning with their international debuts shall we?
Out of curiosity, I wonder how many on the above lists readers would consider in the same class as some of the great conductors of ‘old’. Who genuinely deserves the massively overused honorific “maestro”? Who is up there with Toscanini, Mravinsky, Klemperer, Abbado, Furtwangler . . . ?
I wonder how many would be considered in the same class as some of the great conductors of ‘new”. Dirk Joeres? Hubert Soudant? Bruno Campanella? Who are these people? I’m sure they’re fine conductors but I’ve never heard of them in my life. I guess I need to spend more time on the internet.
For what it’s worth, my little list was made not primarily on the internet (save for checking dates, of course), but by dredging my memory bank for people I’ve heard live and been impressed by, or whose recordings I possess. I think sometimes we can get too hung up on ‘great’ conductors of the past and underestimate those who are still with us. I remember really excellent concerts conducted by (to use the examples above), Soudant and Joeres, with the Salzburg Mozarteum and Westdeutsche Sinfonia respectively. Campanella has worked a lot at the Met, hasn’t he?
I know he’s dead but anyone know how long Ilya Musin conducted for?
and Georges Octors (1923) alive & well and last concert he conducted was in 2009 same concert hall, with the winner of 1983 Reine Elisabeth
http://www.rtbf.be/video/detail_1983-pierre-alain-volondat-france?id=33601