Lakshman Joseph de Saram writes:

>For Bruckner there is but one conductor for me - Celibidache.

Amen to that, but not on recordings.  For me, at any rate, it was
Celibidache doing it live that conjured up the mood that was overwhelming.
Apropos of this, a longish arts piece in today's Sueddetsche Zeitung,of
Munich (written by Klaus Peter Richter who's considered something of
panjandrum here), connects Celi's --and Furtwaengler's-- renderings of
Bruckner with the case history of Orff.  In what sense? Well, the piece
was really about performance of a number of Orff works in New York, and
their crtique by Richard Taruskin in the New York Times.  The Sueddeutche's
piece opined that the NYTimes' treatment of Orff 's music as "fascistoid"
was out of date.  Key elements that went into the construction of this
slant had been swept out of the way by recent scholarship.  The Times'
charge that Orff acted as a musical Pied Piper for the Nazis may have
legitimately appertained to the man, but scarcely to his music.  And
Taruskin's apperception that the kind of "fascistically consecrated
aesthetic" that Orff conveyed also marred the playing of Bruckner's
adagio movements by both Furtwaengler and Celibidache.

To my mind, the way Furtwaengler and Celi played the adagios was in the
purest of German classical tradition, which may not be every man's cup
of tea, but to loop back into it Fascism is like reading the history of
musical pauses into 4' 33".

Denis Fodor