Best Classical Music Conductor

Ben Zander is a professor at a school for gifted young musicians that is connected with the New England Conservatory in Boston. His orchestra is the Boston Philharmonic (BP) made up of pros, NEC students and others. It was formed about 20 years ago. Ben was hired back then to conduct the local Boston Civic Orchestra. When the board of directors found his style too off-the-wall for them, they fired him. The entire orchestra quit in protest; formed the Philharmonic; and the rest is history. His landmark recording is the Rite of Spring with the BP. We are use to the small blurbs in the Penguin guide to classical music. The original Penguin review of Ben's Rite is a page an a half!! The Mahler 9th recording has a third CD with Ben giving a discussion of the piece along with a map of his orchestra setup. Was a grammy nominee. If you search "Zander" in Towerrecords.com or Amazon.com you can find some of them. If you cannot find recordings such as the Rite of Spring you can get them from the Boston Philharmonic directly. Web site is .org -- I use to live near Boston and had the pleasure of hearing him live which is even better.

Ben Zander is a Cellist by training. As a boy in Britain he studied with Benjamin Britten. Ben's students include Yo Yo Ma.

Thanks; I have that Telarc disc with his explanation--simply terrific. Also have his Beethoven 5th and 7th, which reflect unusual and compelling tempi which he believes were Beethoven's intent. I'm going to check out his other work. Interesting about him being a cellist--with my local orchestra, the New Jersey SO, I have felt that the best conductors for the orchestra, both when we were looking for a replacement for Hugh Wolff (Joseph Silverstein and the current music director and principal conductor, Zdenek Maacal) and now as guest conductors all happen to be string players. I wonder if anyone else shares that view, or if it was more a coincidence?

if i'm not mistaken, ben zander was recently featured on 60 minutes. he's the one who makes big bucks as a corporate motivational speaker, right? (BTW, i find nothing wrong with that, especially since he uses music as his grand metaphor.)

Why is there no such thing as history anymore? No one mentioned Reiner or Szell? Cleveland is cleveland but whenever the orchestra went to New York, the critics raved like Bernstein played for the Mets. And Reiner, no one handled soloists as well except perhaps Toscanini and he was a martinet. Columbia made horrible recordings of the Cleveland but the best RCA's produced by the legendary Lewis Layton were done with Reiner. And then you have Solti, and Haitink with the Concertgebouw. Sir Charles Beecham was no slouch, either (actually, you're a great slouch, judge).