Famous orchestral conductors

Every one of them became known outside the concert hall for the same reason, and it is not the concerts. It is the gramophone record, and then the broadcast.

Why conductors became famous at all

Conductors became famous because recording made a conductor's reading of a symphony a purchasable object. Before 1913 there was nothing to buy. In that year Arthur Nikisch recorded Beethoven's Fifth Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic, the first complete symphony committed to disc, and from then on a performance could be compared with another performance by a listener who had heard neither in a hall. That comparison is what created the idea of the conductor as an interpreter with a recognisable personality.

Broadcasting did the rest. The NBC Symphony Orchestra was created in 1937 for Toscanini alone and carried him into American living rooms every week. Bernstein's Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic were televised from 1958 and taught two generations of Americans what an orchestra was. Karajan understood the medium better than any of them, made several hundred records with the Berlin Philharmonic, controlled how he was filmed, and was involved in the arrival of the compact disc in the early 1980s. None of this is about the quality of the conducting. It is about which conductors were pointed at by a microphone.

The names, and the orchestras attached to them

Almost every famous conductor is identified with one orchestra, and the association usually reflects a long tenure and a large discography rather than a single event.

The recording generation, and the argument inside it

The oldest names on the list are famous partly because they disagreed with each other in public. Toscanini stood for literal fidelity to the score, fast tempi and rhythmic exactness. Furtwangler, at the Berlin Philharmonic, stood for the opposite: tempo as an expressive variable, a beat that was deliberately imprecise at the point of attack, and a performance conceived as a single arch. Listeners took sides, critics wrote about it for 40 years, and the argument gave the record-buying public a reason to own two versions of the same symphony.

Karajan inherited that market and industrialised it. Solti built a parallel reputation in the recording studio rather than the hall, above all with the first complete studio recording of Wagner's Ring cycle, made with the Vienna Philharmonic for Decca between 1958 and 1965 under the producer John Culshaw. That set did more for Solti's name than any concert he gave.

The British names

Britain produced three conductors of that generation whose names survive. Sir Adrian Boult conducted the first performance of Holst's The Planets, given privately at the Queen's Hall on 29 September 1918, and led the BBC Symphony Orchestra from its foundation in 1930; his technique was famously economical, all wrist and a long stick. Sir John Barbirolli succeeded Toscanini at the New York Philharmonic in 1936, an appointment that went badly in the American press, then returned to England and rebuilt the Halle Orchestra in Manchester from 1943. Sir Thomas Beecham founded the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1932 and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 1946: two of London's five symphony orchestras exist because he wanted an orchestra to conduct. Klemperer was not British but became a fixture in London, and the Philharmonia Orchestra, founded in 1945 by Walter Legge, is inseparable from the records he made with it.

Three conductors connect directly to the subject of this site, and only the first of them appears in the table above. Owain Arwel Hughes studied at the Royal College of Music in London, where his teachers included Sir Adrian Boult, Bernard Haitink and Rudolf Kempe. Haitink, a Dutch conductor who died in 2021, spent 27 years at the head of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. Kempe, a German conductor who died in 1976, was principal conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the orchestra where Hughes later held the post of principal associate conductor.

Carlos Kleiber, and fame without a post

Carlos Kleiber is the exception that shows what the other names have in common. He held virtually no permanent position, conducted a tiny repertoire, cancelled frequently and recorded very little, yet he is routinely named by professional conductors as the finest of the second half of the twentieth century. His recordings of Beethoven's Fifth and Seventh Symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic are the whole basis of a public reputation. Fame here came from scarcity rather than from saturation, which is the only route to it that does not run through an orchestra's letterhead.

Almost all of them were men

Only two of the fourteen names in the table above, Marin Alsop and Susanna Malkki, are women, and that is a fact about the profession rather than about the list. Orchestras did not appoint women to chief conductorships in any numbers until the twenty-first century. Nadia Boulanger, the composition teacher who trained much of a century of composers, conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1937 and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1938 and remained an isolated case for decades.

The change is recent and traceable. Marin Alsop became music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2007, the first woman to head a major American orchestra, and later led the Sao Paulo State Symphony Orchestra. Susanna Malkki was music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris from 2006 to 2013, became the first woman to conduct an opera at La Scala in Milan in 2011, and has been chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra since 2016. Neither is famous in the way Karajan was famous, but nobody appointed since 1990 is, because the machinery that made conductors household names, a national broadcaster with an orchestra and a record industry selling the same symphony repeatedly, no longer exists.

Also in this programme

• ConductingWhat conducting is, and what it is for
• The baton and the beatWhat it is for and how the beat is shaped
• What a conductor doesWhat does a conductor actually do?
• Orchestral instrumentsThe instruments of the orchestra, family by family