Preview: Sergiu Celibidache--Mad Perhaps, but A Genius? Not. 

Performances that will last a lifetime!

I heard Celibidache live once when he and his Munich orchestra visited Hong Kong when I was in high school. He was too old to stand and he conducted sitting on a chair the whole evening. The sound the orchestra produced was truly amazing. It made the whole symphony hall resonated. I was surrounded with gorgeous sound and the experience was incredible. It is 10x better than the Hong Kong Philharmonic concerts I usually go to. People were criticizing the acoustics of Hong Kong Culture Center Symphony Hall back then. I think it is not the problem of the acoustics. It is simply because the orchestra is sub-par. I am listening to the Orfeo Celibidache box recently and enjoyed it so far. I am also half way through listening to the Erich Kleiber Decca box, and I enjoyed listening to the Celibidache box better than the Kleiber box. In my opinion, all the pieces in the Kleiber box are good but not the best, so why bother with the bad sound? With Celibidache you can at least always hear something different

I saw him live in 1986 with the Munich and no prejudice. It was a marvelous and unforgettable experience. Listening to recordings is, of course, a different matter (I still like the results, though)

I have mixed feelings about Celibidache. Many years ago, 2002-2003, while living in Boston, I awoke one early morning to the sound of music coming out of my old vintage clock radio, broadcast from public radio WGBH. It was really lovely. I was half asleep and didn’t know what it was. I emailed the station and the program people told me it was Tchaikovsky Sym 5 performed by Celibidache/Munich. It was the 2nd movement, which is so lovely. At the time I didn’t know this symphony yet, nor Celibidache; so my first impression was a good one; more than good - transcendent. I purchased his CDs of Tchaikovsky Sym No. 5 & 6, and do not regret it. They are gorgeous. Similarly I like his recordings with Munich of Brahms # 3 & 4. His early recordings 1946-1948 with Berlin Philharmonic, on a 2-disc historical reissue, have some interesting material, particularly the Leonore Overture #3, which was my happy introduction to this masterpiece, and the Prokofiev Symph #1 “Classical”. For me it was a wonderful experience. His performances from this period are much more lively and fresh. There is an interesting video release of him and Berlin 1946 playing the Egmont overture, apparently on a set which resembles the ruins of Berlin, with Celi’s long hair flowing back and forth during his gesticulations. I love the music but in historical perspective, don’t quite understand the use of the ruins as a set for the musicians, one can’t help but feel empathy for the people who died or suffered in the fighting. I find most of his Munich recordings, apart from the above Tchaikovsky & Brahms, (notwithstanding his Bruckner which gets some rave reviews but I have not listened to yet), to be tedious and uninteresting, particularly the Beethoven and Mozart symphonies, for which his slow, ponderous approach, is poorly suited. The LVB Pastoral symphony and Mozart’s No. 40 & 41 (I stopped after these) suffer greatly in these performances. It feels like the soul has been sucked out of the music. Overall, I owe a great debt to Celibidache, for some unique and beautiful listening experiences, but I cannot bring myself to enjoy most of his later work. I had a Celibadache “phase” when I thought he could do no wrong, but it is more complex now.

I keep imagining an encounter between Celibidache and Reginald Goodall. With apologies to Irving Berlin, "Anything you conduct, I conduct slower, I conduct anything slower than you."

The quality of sound that Celibidache got out of an orchestra was simply magical (and I experienced this at live concerts of the Curtis Orchestra, the Munich Phil, and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra). That sound, free of non-musical tension, blended, balanced, and flowing, was impossibly beautiful. He made even the Scythian Suite sound radiantly beautiful. One can argue whether it is worth sacrificing other things to achieve that sound. But that is the deliberate choice he made. That sound absolutely cannot be captured on a radio broadcast, an analogue LP, or a CD. So the recording gives you the image of the sacrifices made for the sound without capturing the beauty of the sound itself. I seldom listen to his recordings because they cannot capture what he was really trying to do, and imitating what he does on the recordings (and especially the tempos) without the substance of creating that sound would be perverse. Now I have no credibility with random people reading this. Why should anybody take my word for it that there is a potential for beauty in sound that no microphone, amplifier, and speakers can successfully reproduce? In my defence, let me say I was not predisposed by temperament to believe such a thing until I heard it for myself. Unfortunately, that is no help to anyone baffled by these recordings, which really ought not even exist if there were real respect for the artist's wishes.

I basically had written him off - no need to hear anything that he conducted. Had a chance to hear him live in Boston with Munich Phil. I stood in back of the 2nd balcony at Symphony Hall, with the intent of walking out. Never did. You could tell that the orchestra had been rehearsed to an inch of their lives, the sound they produced was extraordinary. Yes, everything was very slow, and there's no way in hell I'd want to hear those pieces performed that way on a regular basis - Don Juan, Rhapsodie Espagnole, Pictures. But as a one off, it was amazing - go figure.

An artist deserves to be judged by his finest accomplishments. One of my favorite films is "Night of the Hunter," the only movie Charles Laughton ever directed. If he had directed another ten films, and if all ten were lousy, would "Night" be any less of a triumph? Of course not. Celi's Bruckner changed my life. I haven't much liked most of his performances of non-Bruckner works. What of it? I still count him among the greatest of the greats.

Well, getting "a kick" out of Celi's interpretations would be a slow kick for sure. :) A (small) part of me wonders how much it had to do with the Buddhistic leanings of Celibidache, and how much of it we do not really "get", which the stomach-chanting monks probably do about the elevatory power of music. I found this sumptuous looking scarlet-and-black box once for 49 Euros (which is exactly 1Eur per CD) and thought it was worth taking a risk on a legend at the price of 3 new records. I still think the move was worth it. The conducting IS predominantly slow, according to the man's notorious beliefs ("so one sound does not interfere with another"), but not uniformly excruciatingly slow. Of course all those masses and Requiems I listened to so far are not captivating in the least, he even drives the light and beautiful Faure firmly into the ground. But overall there were some good surprises. I was expecting "the worst of Beethoven" here, but not that it really is (I mean, not stellar or revelatory, but I know worse). The reason probably being Celibidache is not cosmically slow here, some symphs only 5 to 10 minutes slower than, say the efficient Karajan - Celibidaches nemesis. :)) Of course, for Haydn and Mozart, the "searching" approach does not work at all - and Celi knew it, so only 2 discs of that. The Bruckner is at times beautiful, but more in 3rd or 7th symphonies for me than the lauded 4th (given, here NOT with Vienna!), 5th (the slow brass eating into my mind), or 9th. The Russians within this collection come off quite good, although the timings are really scary on paper - probably it is just that the "Russian soul" can support this type of wallowing in emotion. I like the quite lyrical (but not boring) overtures discs, and (amazingly) the Schubert 9 - the only thing Celi did of his - which in the contemplative runtime of 57 mins becomes a grand and majestic occasion - which might be what the composer intended, although it is in contradiction to the general view of him. The thing is, the music shows itself flexible enough! One thing to take away - to listen to Celibidache, one has to be in a certain mood. Not necessary to buy into all the philosophical ideas, since an exceptional piece of music ought to captivate without any intervention from conductors. But some things are interesting to hear, just like they are with most of those earlier podium chiefs who had the luxury of a long period with same musical corps to polish their ideas.

Well... he was always saying that he doesn't hold the absolute truth in music and nobody else does in absence of the composer. The one trying to pass his own subjective opinions as "the truth" is just another idiot... that was in his own words. I like the fact that he left "something" for his critics too, even after his death. Well done Maestro!

I don't like much of his work but the first movement of the EMI Bruckner 8th is to my ear just magically intense and perfect (he can't rescue the terrible finale which I've never been convinced by in any performance) but that opening movement is intense and glowing.

Thank you David for dealing with this box set. For my part, I think it's just a matter of taste; I hate Céli's beethovens, Mozart, and even bruckner in general but I find him great in Ravel's Bolero of the 80's, maybe because I like the powerful bolero with the powerful final collapse; or with Mussorgsky, or with Respighi and his I Pini della Via Appia with the Stuttgart Radio, and other dazzling. Like all conductors! This crazy Maestro, because he was, was capable of the worst but also the best, for my ear. And yet, even if I wouldn't put him on my podium, Céli was fascinating, hypnotic, and possessed an incredible charisma, an unbearable ego, a human being. It seems that KARAJAN would have said of him: "he is crazy, but what a conductor!" And ironically, I find that to be the best definition of CELIBIDACHE. Sincerely.

Not being very knowledgeable about conductors I can only say that being a favorite collaborator of Michelangeli must carry some merit. Their performances of the Emperor and Ravel concerto are extraordinary.

I saw Celibidache and Munich do Bruckner 4 in Chicago in the late 80s. At that time I did not have the musical sophistication to understand everything he was trying to do, but I remeber being impressed with the meticulous care of the performance and the sort of fascination with sound and texture on both the podium and in the orchestra. At the end, I will never forget the approximately 15 minutes of applause from the crowd. However, lest you think it was all about the brilliance of the music, the main reason it happened was because Celibidache gave every single wind player an extended solo bow one at a time and the audience seemed to feel obligated to applaud. It struck me as a huge piece of narcissism, I am glad I was able to enjoy the performance in spite of it.

Hi David, love the channel. I often hear you mention conductors either knowing or not knowing how to conduct sonata form. I must admit that I don't know how to listen for that. Is there a source that you recommend for me to read and learn about it? Or perhaps you would consider making a video about it? Thanks.

For me Celibidache has a top 1. His recording of Bruckner's Fourth symphony is my benchmark but the rest of his output is self indulgent clap trap.

I saw Celibidache and the LSO in the late 1970s. His concerts had an incredible tension in that you often wondered if the music would end before it ground to a halt. Occasionally things went badly awry as at the end of Kodaly’s Dances from Galanta which added to the excitement. As you say the release of so many off air recordings confirms that outside the concert experience his performances were often just flat and slow.

His Scheherezade is just amazing. The second movement… the melody of the oboe is hanging from air, just amazing, and the crescendo of the finale… just amazing. BUT, most of the time I just don’t have the energy to listen to his suicidal tempi.

Celibidache is unparalleled as a conductor of Anton Bruckner -- those are some truly astounding performances. He understood that the greatest works of the Central European industrial modernist musicians did not follow a fully commercialized or industrialized time, but were an admixture of dynastic-agrarian time interspersed with peroids of frenetic industrial activity (Bruckner's famous "blocks" of sound, which seem disconnected at first, but are carefully constructed to cohere on a global level, very much like how the Hapsburg dynasty held together dozens of ethnicities and confessional identities).

In addition to the texture and balance of his performances, I think that Celibidache had this rather special way of maintaining tension and forward drive in his Bruckner symphonies, in spite of (or perhaps because of) his extremely slow tempi. I find myself sort of leaning forward in my chair as I listen, anticipating climaxes that almost always occur, it seems to me, at exactly the right time. Something of an exception, though, is the seventh. That's a little too slow, even for my 86-year-old ears; especially the second movement. Whether or not he was a genius, I can't say, but I think he certainly had a special relationship with Bruckner.

I think of a review for the Los Angeles Times when Celibidache brought over the Munich Philharmonic and performed Bruckner 4. One critic said that Bruckner had marked the finale “not too quickly”… “He needn’t have worried.”

It’s interesting that in an era that has gotten so fast, even in old world music thanks to HIP practices which sometimes speed up baroque and early classical period music to seemingly bebop and punk rock tempos, that there have been some musicians who have gone to the opposite direction extreme and slowed down to such a degree. Celibidache, Giulini, later Bernstein, sometimes Barenboim (at the podium sometimes), and pianists such as Sokolov, Afanassiev, Pogorelich, Barenboim (at the piano sometimes).

Thank you. I have never heard many of his recordings. I recall the Olympic terror attack in Munich. A service to honor the victims was televised in which the Munich Philharmonic performed the Beethoven Eroica funeral march. Did Celibidache conduct that performance?

“a musical vivisection , like some of Gould’s Beethoven” very well said :)

Regarding your comment about his "mature" period vs his earlier "normal" conducting, he had stated that in his early years he did not make, or did not know how to make music. Such as he had made derogatory criticism about a number ofother conductors. He had training in philosophy, and seems like he created his own world of understanding what music is. Versus a professional music critic would take a broader view of understanding of what music is.

Can I just say that the thumbnail of this video is absolutely amazing.

I appreciate your explanation of him being a chord rather than line conductor, and often dull performances. You are onto something, I never had seen it like that before. It has prompted me to look for an inherently wild and exciting composition conducted by Celibidache, to see if he can dull it out. Just finished listening to the New World Symphony. It sounds nothing like a Dvořák composition, however it is very serene and beautiful. To me it sounds more like a Viennese or German composition, rather than an East European music, and it loses the meaning of the composition. Regardless, I will listen to it again.

The advantage of acquiring music at a used CD store is you can purchase questionable discs at a discount. One day I came upon Celibidache conducting Bruckner's 6th, 9th & Mass along with Tchaikovsky's 5th and Debussy's La Mer/Iberia for $12.50 + tax. Some performances work better than others and my curiosity has been sated. I think I will stop when I am ahead.

If you think time stands still during some of his recordings, try the film Le jardin de Celibidache / Celibidache's Garden...

If you do everything slowly, you'll find some music, for which this approach works. But a conductor should find an attractive interpretation for music they do, whereas what Celibidache did, was the opposite - setting his interpretation first and then looking for music, for which his approach worked. The result is as inflexible as it gets. For me, he's one of the names to avoid. If I was a member of any conductor cult, then I was in a Karajan camp, but I've listened to much more ever since. I think the same would happen to anyone thinking that one conductor was above anyone else, at best, it can only be true for a few works.

Two of his performances on youtube have really surprised me; partially because they're pieces I'd never imagine him doing in a month of Sundays but mainly because they are done superbly: the Schoenberg Orchestral Variations and the Tippett Ritual Dances from the Midsummer Marriage. Perhaps if he'd spent less time wallowing in Bruckner....................

Just listened to his recording of La Symphonie Fantastique with the Munich Phil. It sounds to me as if it's a recording of four sectional rehearsals of an underfunded Youth Orchestra sightreading simultaneously in adjoining rooms (of which I have first-hand experience). And I can see what you mean by all accents being smoothed out into a mush of pointlessness. (You didn't say that precisely, but you know what I mean, Dave.) Those witches are trying their best to orgy but with at least one leg wedged under a rock it all went horribly wrong until the final few bars of (unwritten) accelerando.

I like celibidache. But it seems i am the only one here. 😅

I could never understand this cult. So many other wonderful artists to listen to.

Agreed. I've only really liked one performance of his, and that's Bruckner's 6th.

Apropos cult conductors, it just occurred to me, Dave, that I never have heard you comment on the conductor Asahina. I have heard many wonderful Asahina recordings (Bruckner) , but some not so much (e.g. Beethoven symphonies -yawn.) . But he is definitely a cult type figure.

I hold Leopold Stokowski in high esteem for what he did live and recorded. He challenged engineers to present the best reproduced sound possible with exciting performances, correct or in his own vision. You knew the music he was playing despite often editorializing. He also performed many, many modern works. He was one of the great conductors. I probably have 40+ Stokowski recordings. The Celibidache I have heard (recorded only) also sounded okay but uneventful in the 1950s (standards) and bizarrely slow and unstructured in the 1970s. I don't think I am going to start collecting/listening to Celibidache. Thank you soooo much for letting me know what a kook he was. Music requires rhythm, even if it only one note. He apparently thought it only required sound, rhythm be damned!

Haha. Nice video David. I laugh because I jumped on the Celibadache bandwagon, when they brought out the Bruckner symphonies by him for example. I welcomed the very slow tempi at the time. Because I wanted to get as much "spirituality" from Bruckner as I could. So I buried myself in headphones for an hour or....ahem two. And listened to his Bruckner set. I actually liked it.... well for the most part....I actually thought his "4th" was very good.... that incredibly slow coda, (he struggled to control for some of the time). But it felt so much like a pilgrimage of a lengthy struggle through life, and we finally got home, with a few scars... But I then listened to Bruckner's 5th, and he applied the same thinking to that symphony...And it completely failed...so no... I've totally lost interest in him now...

I tried a few of his bruckner's but never felt the need to get more. I found the finale to the sixth weird.

Have you heard Maximianno Cobra, a hack who somehow got an orchestra and chorus to record his interpretation of Beethoven's Ninth? It is infamously bad, making Boehm's 1980 recording seem lively. Don't get a CD of it or his Beethoven symphony "cycle"-- that recording of the Ninth plus "recordings" of the others on string section samples. Just search on RU-vid and be appalled.

@DavesClassicalGuide luckily we can all have our own opinions! Maybe you should also pay attention about that what you’re saying is just your opinion or your impression ;)

Musical phenomenology

A few "revelatory" performances does not a genius make. But, I have to say that his very slow tempo for the coda of Bruckner's 8th, works for me.

La Mer and the Maestro..wow!

I don't understand why you are so down on Celibadache. I always found his work to be beautiful...

As you once said David 'you gotta have an acquired taste for this music'. Not all it's Bruckner is good (ex S7) as not al the rest of it's Munich recordings are bad!

No top 10. Very funny.

Totally in synch with you on Celibidache. I believe his only worthy renditions are Bruckner's 4th and Debussy's La Mer and Iberia. I would also recommend his Ravel Daphnis & Chloé suite no. 2 but with the Orchestre National de France. Everything else sucks big time. In the end cult conductors become their worst enemies.

I love Celibidache’s Bruckner, others don’t, and neither camp is likely to ever convince the other. So my big question with Celi is: how and why did he become what he became? Somewhere, I have a recording of Prokofiev’s “Classical” that Celibidache made as a young man with Italian forces before he swore off the recording studio. The performance is, well, normal. I think Celibidache also recorded that work with Munich live and it’s three times as long, or at least it feels that way. Might be the longest Prokofiev #1 on record. This isn’t a mere case of an aging conductor inadvertently getting more mannered and slow. At some point, Celi totally changed his approach and injected with lumbering pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo. Perhaps the upcoming Malkovich film will enlighten us all.

I only once attended a concert conducted by Celidache and it was disappointing. His podium manner was eccentric - the only time I've seen a conductor use his feet as well as his hands though I'm not sure what the kicks were meant to indicate to the performers. Apparently he had been footballer when young. Dvořák Symphony 7 with LSO - very heavy and lumpy.

For me, Celibidache is a bit of a mixed bag. Some of his recordings (especially the later ones) are unlistenably slow. His earlier recordings (the DG recordings) are much better in terms of tempi. I've always thought of him as the "Sergio Leone" of the conductor world...drawing out the slower parts, making them slower, but keeping the faster parts quick...at least in his mid-period. This sometimes works well (like his Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet Overture) and sometimes it's a bit of a mixed bag...like his Mussorgsky's Pictures where the promenades, Gnomus and Great Gate are 'tough to listen to' slow, but the Old Castle and the Ox & cart and hatched chickens are perfectly timed. His is definitely a unique voice/vision (ahem) and I want to hear everything he's done at least once. (Sometimes once is enough!!) It might be heaven, it might be hell, but it's never boring.

Brilliant speech

A funny thing about Celibidache being a "chord guy" par excellence is that there's a COUNTERPOINT book by Markand Thakar which is almost entirely based on the teachings of... you guessed it... Sergiu Celibidache. It is an absolutely bizarre book, spending inordinate amount of times talking about "primordial lines" -- only specific kinds of lines which follow certain rules are apparently "primordial," one of those assertions said with more confidence than evidence (you could provide 50 counterexamples to their thesis by going through your score library for ten minutes). It is the very rare counterpoint book that focuses just as much on the performer as the composer -- an interesting idea, but as you can guess their suggestions are very much less than practical. It's definitely a window into Celibidache's general musical worldview. It talks a lot about "the highest spiritual beauty of music" in which the listener transcends time and space. He's very convinced that he's attaining it, the audience less so. "Mad without the genius" is a perfect description.

i have two beautiful recording with celibidache from some long time....the dvorak cello concerto with jacqueline du pré ( dgg),and the brahms violin concerto with ida haendel ( emi)i re listen this recording and i like...beatiful soloist beautiful orchestra....the tempo...? so is ok...no rubato anywere

Watching videos of him rehearse is agony. Lecturing, lecturing, blah, blah, blah… “cult conductor” indeed… He reminds me of the unbearable opera directors in Europe, who build an entire set design on one insight, and ruin the entire opera pounding home one single observation…

Celibidache s slowish tempos I found were self indulgent and drove me crazy!

You are so right about all those later Celibidache performances, especially the ones with the Munich forces. They all sound like he just came off a manic episode and has now entered the depressive phase just as he picked up the baton to conduct. A shame, since some of the earlier performances issued with Italian orchestras who an exciting and dramatic talent. Especially the Mozart Great Mass with an Italian orchestra. wow! Of course I have long thought the Emperor Concerto with Michelangeli and Celi in Paris was possibly that greater ever. But that likely had more to do with Michelangeli.

Not for no reason that secondhand music stores are stocked to the rafters with Celi! To his credit, he got some wonderful sounds from the Munich Phil, something even Kempe couldn't reliably achieve...

A frank and accurate assessment of the ultimate "cult" conductor. Several years ago I made the mistake of investing in EMI's mammoth Celi Box, prompted by my strong positive reaction to hearning his Munich Bruckner 4 & 6, which I regarded as nothing short of Divine Revelation. Well, of course it doesn't follow that if Celi can manage to reveal the depths of two Bruckner symphonies, then he can do the same for Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, et. al. So much for impulse buying; lesson learned. Now I can hardly fathom what I heard in Celi's Bruckner, though I will grant that his way with the coda in 4:IV is truly stunning. Otherwise, the slow tempos now tend to put me to sleep. Give me Jochum any day of the week in that symphony and Bruckner generally.

He speaks very highly of you.

I experienced the Celibidache cult up close in Munich as a teen - a conglomerate of gents in traditional clothing, over-perfumed old biddies, and pompous men discussing their big diesel Mercedes, all swooning over their messiah. I might have been fifteen years old, but could already recognize BS when I heard it. The more so because by then the concerts were excruciatingly dull, not helped by the fact that the Munich Phil was hardly the best ensemble of the time. I particularly remember (this was later, I think) a glacial Dvorak 9th that had all remains of excitement ripped from its cold corpse. If that is "mystic genius" I will pass, thank you.

I agree with you Dave Once you put the music into small squares (and the very slow tempo is also part of small squares) you loose the definitive line of energy . I studied with him short period With philosophy you can't make music. With music you can make philosophy . The absolute opposite is Markevich I also studied with him

I agree with every word of this review. Celibidache was essentially a one trick pony and it wasn’t a very good trick at that. Most of what he did was intolerable. However, there is a live Prelude To The Afternoon of A Faun on RU-vid that is as seductive and spellbinding as you could hope for. And his Bruckner 4th on EMI is sublime. So his approach could yield spectacular results but, unfortunately that was almost never the case.

You're mad and he's a genius😂

If it wasn't for all of his recordings uploaded on RU-vid, I never would have known. I grew up on the belief that he was one of the greats. And I as I started listening, I felt that he smoothed out so many parts, and didn't have enough drive in so many works (Beethoven 7 for example), that I found it odd. I slowly came to realize that he was over rated! So I'm glad that you and many others here feel the same way. There are a few of his recordings I do like, but on the whole, so many of the other greats have him beat in my favorite repertoire.

You hit it on the head Dave. There does exists this idea in euro Germanic circles this notion as music as a pseudo religious philosophical rite of revalation. I've listened to a lot of celibidache. His Brahms is tepid, soft. His Bruckner other then a munich 4th and 6th, is slow soft rounded pudding. His Bruckner te deum and 3rd mass, hazy. Soft., Slow and meandering. If you want to hear Bruckner done well by a conductor with a long name, go with skrowaczewski. Paul

finally, a fair review of the mystical beast.

i think most of us heard Celibidache's Bruckner 4 and were blown away. Then we heard more and more of his Bruckner and other recordings and were left underwhelmed. What was the problem? Us or him? In time, you realize it was him.

His type of personality always has a cult following. He is loved by the crazy music lovers living in their moms basement at 38. They all moved over to Theadorakis.

In this I completely agree with you. Almost always the works of the hand of this director are a plumb. And to this is added the arrogance with which he contemptuously judges and criticizes other orchestra conductors. And if we compare his discography with that of those same directors, the Romanian comes out very badly!!!

I like listening to crazy directors, if only to know why I like others. But Celi tests my patience. Glad to see that the community here would mostly understand.

Heard many of his concerts in the 80ies in Munich. Some (quite few actually ) were outstanding, best in my memory that Faure Requiem...and then some great Ravel and Debussy. Bruckner was mixed ( f-minor mass is admittedly fantastic), but the rest often unbearably dull and ponderous. Brahms,Schumann,Tschaikowsky...starved of oxygen. Worst of all: Bach and Haydn. Dead, lifeless,dull, a travesty. The devoted fan club around him was often Comedy Gold. I remember one thesis from these enlightened circles: "Yes, that may have sounded boring, but if it did then its the composition, not Celi. He only brought out what's in it" I rest my case and get my coat.

Believe me, most of what I had of Celibidache was in digital format, and I deleted it all after watching this 😀

When Celibidache didn't get the Berlin Phil job that he felt he deserved, I think he decided that he was going to be the guy to out - Furtwaengler Furtwaengler. What we ended up with was a conductor with all of the worst qualities of Furtwaengler and few of the better ones.

Oh David, maybe you are too charitable in your assessment. All this incandescent, resplendent, transcendent intent and realization (well, not really) of what the man, for most of his artistic life, had in his mind's ear. Poppycock, rubbish and, dare I say, bull. All because the basic pulse for a work, and specific tempi in movements/passages, was increasingly rendered as molasses flows in the dead of a Deadwood winter. Requiring more rehearsal time (if an organization can afford it) to get balances and ensemble execution, phrasing, articulation etc. just so is commendable and the rewards are readily heard. The plodding, sometimes (often?) glacial tempos obviously can highlight the 'inner' voices and details in passages that tantalize and delight ears, live, that are used to hearing recordings of tangible impact (e.g. swifter, more powerful) that may not capture the details so well (we've seen his rehearsal footage of several works, no?) I contend that at some of the chosen tempos, he could have had a good amateur orchestra (if they could have handled the sarcasm/criticism in rehearsal), never mind the Munich Phil., reach his philosophical heights in musical rhetoric just as satisfyingly. Yet, all for naught if the results were, as you point out, simply boring.

Celibidache was a hype, as there are many in music( pop as well as classical), e.g Gould, Callas...admired as divine but in fact mediocre at its best.

His orchestra wasn't able to play any faster. There's no other good reason for his tempo choices.