Running through the files of musicians we have lost this year, we fell to wondering which giants from the past would we bring back from the other side, if such encounters were permitted.
Would it be…
Or
Perhaps
Or (our choice)?
Your call?
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For me, one of the greatest failings of the recording industry is that they never recorded Rachmaninoff playing concertos by composers other than himself. Apparently he played Liszt 1st, Tchaic 1st and several Beethoven concertos – but we can only guess how these all sounded.
I’d vote for Rach to come back. At least there are a lot of Nathan Milstein recordings.
I second: Rachmaninoff.
Apparently, in the 1940s he proposed that RCA record his concerts live – the knaves refused. We would have had the Schumann concerto and the Liszt sonata ….
Anton Seidl – the incomparable conductor of Wagner music (by repute) that no one on the planet has ever seen or heard!
Philippe Hirshhorn, immediately. And make him to record!
Absolutely!
Ferenc Fricsay
oh, yes!
Sviatoslav Richter.
Yup, that’s who i was gonna choose. And maybe Heifetz too.
The young Yo Yo Ma.
Johannes Brahms and/or Arthur Rubinstein.
Johannes Brahms and/or Arthur Rubinstein
Johannes Brahms AND Arthur Rubinstein!
Annabelle Rubinstein
Paderewski…………
Glenn Gould.
Art Tatum.
William Pleeth and Margaret Good. 12 January 1938, their debut at Wigmore Hall.
Kathleen Ferrier
The pianists – Vladimir Horowitz, Dinu Lipatti, Benno Moiseiwitsch & Earl Wild.Violinist- Josef Hassid because he was a one off genius who died tragically young.Conductors- Carlos Kleiber because he gave us so little of his talent and the recently departed Claudio Abbado because he had so much more to give
This one is easy. Either Farinelli or Senesino. Who wouldn’t want to hear what the great castrati were really like?
Mozart. Verdi. Wagner. To show them some of the recent productions of their operas.
+1
Would love to hear Mahler conduct his own works.
Vladimir Horowitz, Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Ignaz Friedman, Josef Lhevinne, Emmanuel Feuermann (and many, many others …)
Liszt.
John Fletcher – The greatest tuba player. LSO/Philip Jones Brass. As musical as ANY world renowned pianist or violin player.
Ginette Neveu playing Chausson Poeme and Ludwig Suthaus as Tristan.
Celibidache by all means …he knew
more about the art of music than all
mentioned .
No, he didn’t. But he was great at making naive people believe that. He was a very good conductor with a very acute sense of hearing and excellent rehearsal skills, his concerts were fascinating to listen to if musically rather one-dimensional, just focused on celebrating his sound, but he wasn’t the kind of second coming that many simple-minded people think he was because of his endless babbling about Buddhism and how great and enlightened he was.
Toscanini,Bernstein,Stokowski,Koussevitzky,Beecham,Reiner,Szell,Munch,Ormandy,Monteux,Horowitz,Heifetz,Piatigorsky,Strawinsky,Copland,Barber,and all Symphony Players of great Us and UK Orchestras of the past.In short.All the heroes of my youth!Oh,I forgot Jack Benny and Victor Borge!
Yes, Mahler. Put him in front of the Chicago Symphony and records symphonies 2, 5, 6, 9, and Das Lied. Maybe then we’d have a definitive answer on the order of movements in the 6th, a better idea of what he wanted in 9 and Das Lied. And if there’s time left over, finish the 10th!
William Kapell, Dinu Lipatti, Nathan Milstein & Carlo Bergonzi.
Celibidache! But probably he would require more than just one day of rehearsal time..
Sergiu Celibidache
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli
Fritz Busch
Claudio Arrau
Guido Cantelli
Thomas Schippers
And I forgot:
Dino Ciani
Jean de Reszke, Giovanni Rubini and Sims Reeves in their prime, so that we could hear what their voices were really like 🙂
…and Bruckner, so he could complete his sublime 9th.
Paganini
It is those that left us too early who I would like to see come again to enthrall us even more with their music. A few have been mentioned already, Dinu Lipatti, Kathleen Ferrier, Josef Hassid and Guido Cantelli. There are more that died too young.
Guido Cantelli, Istvan Kertesz and Dennis Brain.
Oh, yeah…and Thomas Schippers.
I would like to meet the man that composed the end of the first movement of the Bruckner Seventh Symphony. The biographies are worthless for understanding the heart and mind of the great man who composed it.
Jose Iturbi
Oh, and Leopold Stokowski. Who knows what he would have done had he lived longer?
Florence Foster Jenkins
Mr. Endres, spot on ……
Any and all of the above plus Rossini, who had such an interesting life, to tell us about it and show us how to make unborn generations laugh.
Clara Schumann
Tossy Spivakovsky and Efrem Kurtz, how about on the same stage together?
Franz Liszt, most definitely.
I echo the vote of Milton Ribeiro above – Ferenc Fricsay. We can only imagine the further heights he could have achieved had he not died so relatively young in 1963. He would have been 100 this year.
J.S. BACH!
Would love to hear him talk about his own music and play it too.
Franz Schubert. Died much too young. Would have liked to hear what he had to say as he entered his more advanced “jazz period’.
Jean Sibelius. Just to see if he would ever eventually come out of retirement. Could be a long wait.
Do you think we could persuade him to finish his Symphony No. 8? And not throw it into the fireplace?
We’ll also have to bring back Celibidache to conduct the premiere of the Sibelius 8th. But then again, I don’t think I have that much time left in my own life.
In which case, bring back Barbirolli to conduct it… (The performance would take almost as long, but we’d probably save some time on the rehearsals.)
I’d like to hear what the high-romantics, especially Brahms and Tchaikovsky, really meant by all those tempo modifiers. How much less is not so much?
And I’d love to hear what Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin would do with a modern concert grand. (At least one would confound expectations, I’m sure.)
George London (with a fully recovered voice, of course).
I’d definitely include the Busch quartet to the list.
Carlos Kleiber
Carlos Kleiber for sure and Maria Callas – who else???
we already have Florence Foster Jenkins , why would one want Callas ?To link Callas with Carlos Kleiber is
to lack musical discernment.
George Gershwin.
Furtwangler and Arthur Rubinstein
Oh, yes..!
and definitely the Busch Quartet!
Chopin.
Milton Babbitt!
It has to be Carlos Kleiber, but only after agreeing a Faustian bargain with him that he must conduct (with no rehearsal) the VPO in another New Year’s Day concert; the Eroica; Mahler 3; Meistersinger; and also agree to give an extended TV interview.
I’ll join you in signing that Faustian bargain with CK!
To pick one from each field:
Wanda Landowska
Carlos Salzedo
Victoria de los Angeles
Leopold Stokowski
Pablo Casals
Zino Francescatti
William Kincaid
Ricardo Vines
Gabriel Faure
Georges Enescu
This is my short-list of the greatest musicians of the 20th century.
Clara Haskil, to play those Mozart piano concertos. With Fricsay, Schuricht, and Cluytens to take turns conducting.
All that in one day? That would be a bit much to ask even of a workaholic like Mahler was reputed to be. And why the Chicago Symphony? That would be a waste of time. They have no knowledge of the style of and no ensemble culture suited for his music, they just play everything like “Star Wars”.
That was a response to Martin Haub.
Nathan Milstein
Jascha Heifetz
Joseph Hassid
William Kapell
Dinu Lipatti
Carlo Bergonzi
Fritz Wunderlich
Renata Tebaldi
Bidu Sayão
Carlos Kleiber
Klaus Tennstedt
Thomas Schippers
Guido Cantelli
Fritz Reiner
Carlo Maria Giulini
wouldn’t dream of showing any parental (voice or piano) bias…, but it would be nice.