Kevin Sutton fires off a blistering reply to Allan Kohrman on Jeffrey Tate:

>>lacks the charisma of Barenboim, Ozawa, Muti, and other musical
>>mediocrities.
>
>I also have problems with your tendency to make blamket statements
>about musicians, calling them musical mediocrities as above.  Mediocre
>musicians do not rise to the level of Muti and Ozawa and especially
>Barenboim and stay there for long.  You may not agree with their styles
>and interpretations, but if you are so good...well, let's just say that
>I haven't seen your name at the helm of a major orchestra of late.

Speaking from Allan's side of things, you don't, as Peter DeVries once
pointed out, ask a cow to give an opinion of milk.  Second, in the world
I live in, mediocrities rise and stay all the time.  Both cream and pond
scum rise to the top. However, I do agree with Kevin that some sort of
distortion is at work here.  Because of the legacy of recordings, we keep
comparing these guys to the best we know, even though almost every one
of the best is long dead: Mengelberg, Toscanini, Koussevitzky, Szell,
Furtwaengler, Walter, Horenstein, Reiner, Barbirolli, Beecham, and so on.
Is this healthy? On the one hand, we seemed mired in the past.  On the
other, we have a wider experience of artists.  We can't know for ourselves
exactly how stupendous or artistic a pianist Liszt was, but recordings let
us hear something of Rachmaninoff, Cortot, and Paderewski.

Steve Schwartz