(photo from article, credit Richard Termine/The New York Times)
Jaime J. Weinman's "The case of the missing conductor" discusses in Canadian weekly magazine Maclean's the dual-city (super)conducting (super)efforts of Maestro James Levine under the duress of not-so-great health.
Opera Chic contributed a quote.
OC only half-jokingly refers to The Met as "The House That Jimmy Built", because the Levine era meant everything -- vision, integrity, and incredibly high quality of the conducting. Levine changed the karaoke mentality of the old school Met, the irrelevant conductor beating time and the music as mere accompaniment for the singers and whatever action was happening on stage. He's the American star conductor who took over the greatest American orchestra -- Bernstein never cared enough about conducting opera, he maybe had too much stuff going on at the same time, and Schippers died way too young. This means no American giant of the podium, before Levine, had turned a big opera institution into a beautiful musical machine. The Met is what it is today, musically, thanks to Levine.
Arguably, there are three giants left conducting music nowadays -- Abbado, Muti, and Levine. Everybody else -- as wonderful as they are -- is either not as good as them, or just too young. The problem, obviously, is that Levine's declining health (it has been declining for a while now, unfortunately) means that it's one thing to have to conduct sitting down or stop using one's left arm as he had to do -- this would be bad enough.
But surgeries, cancellations, and a general air of uncertainty is by now a significant problem.
Major, wonderful conductors have had to scale down their commitments to due health problems lately -- from Abbado to Temirkanov to Janssons. And one only has to think about the devastating effect of Carlos Kleiber's emotional problems on his career -- and we're talking about the greatest conducting talent since, well, probably Furtwaengler.
It's sad but conducting is such hard physical work that health problems can truly do a lot of damage. If Levine can't solve his long-standing health issues, a less stressful Guest Conductor post could be created for him.
OC's contenders for a hypothetical new Met MD?
An obvious candidate would be Fabio Luisi: a serious man who knows the theater and can do Italian opera and the German repertoire with the same depth and commitment. It's hard to think of a better candidate, musically speaking. Antonio Pappano would be another obvious choice -- he knows the US well and his love for opera is as real as his talent.
And for the BSO? We've heard everything from von Dohnányi to MTT -- but really, the draft picks are so wild it makes us wonder: Does Godstavo have a brother?