This a recent London Times article. No author to hand: 'To the great conductors, music was love and death and the air they breathed' Not long ago giants strode this planet. They mesmerised and terrified and thrilled all who encountered them. Their rage was like thunder, but their joy touched millions. They were conduits for genius, and they were geniuses in their own right. They were called conductors. Even today their recordings send shivers down musically susceptible spines. Toscanini, Klemperer, Furtwangler, Walter, Szell: the very names evoke a grander era. Perhaps because many of them had experienced the foulest chapters of 20th-century history at first hand, their performances seemed to aspire to a higher plane of truth. To these conductors music wasn't a business. It was love and death and the air they breathed. Where are such towering maestros today? This is the question that anybody who loves classical music, and who regrets its increasingly marginalised status, urgently wants to answer. For there is no doubt that the absence of compelling personalities from the world's podiums is one big reason why attempts to sell orchestras to a wider public so often fail. You can devise the most cunning marketing, hire fantastic players, put on superb programmes. But if the man wafting the baton has all the charisma of a sock, you have a problem. Boy, do we have problems. How many of today's conductors blaze out the sort of performances that stand even remote comparison with those chipped 78s of Toscanini or Klemperer? How many grip the public imagination as Bernstein did? I can think of just three. One is Carlos Kleiber, and since he lives up a mountain, charges a fee equivalent to the gross domestic product of Portugal, and has appeared in public just five times in five years, I don't think he quite fits the bill as the saviour of music. The other two are Valery Gergiev, the wild-eyed tsar of the Kirov Opera, and our own Simon Rattle, who sends a 10,000-watt surge through every orchestra he conducts. As for the rest, well, there are some fine musicians around; one thinks of Chailly in Amsterdam, Jansons in Pittsburgh, Haitink and Davis in London. But charismatic? Awesome? Towering? Even their own publicists wouldn't bend the meaning of adjectives that far. All of which explains the hysteria currently gripping the orchestral business. For by chance several of the world's top ensembles are looking for new principal conductors right now - and there just ain't enough charisma to go round. Let's start at the top. Next Wednesday members of the Berlin Philharmonic will vote on who will succeed Claudio Abbado, the enigmatic Italian who had the temerity to walk out on them (the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic is expected to depart from his post only in a coffin). The two favourites are Rattle, who hasn't done any lobbying at all and indeed speaks little German, and Daniel Barenboim, who has been politicking like crazy in five languages. I know who would get my vote, but in Berlin the hot money is on Barenboim, who will roll out wall-to-wall Beethoven and Bruckner and inspire almost nobody under 60. If he does go to Berlin, however, he would almost certainly have to give up being music director of the Chicago Symphony, for it is inconceivable that the world's two greatest "powerhouse" orchestras could share the same conductor, even in these thin times. And that would add even more uncertainty to the American musical scene. Masur is soon to leave the New York Philharmonic, Sawallisch is retiring from Philadelphia, and there are also vacancies in Atlanta, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Houston. Where are the giants who will set the wild echoes flying in these thrusting cities? Your guess is as good as mine. But if you seek an indication of how dire the situation is, look no further than Cleveland, Ohio. Last week, that ferociously proud orchestra appointed as its new maestro the 38-year-old Austrian Franz Welser-Most, still best known for being nicknamed "Frankly Worse Than Most" during six patchy and peculiar years with the London Philharmonic. That was unfair. "Frankly No Worse Than Most" would have been nearer the mark. But handing him the keys to one of America's great musical mansions? Things must be a bit desperate. Given that background, the appointment last week of Mark Elder to succeed the expansive and expensive Kent Nagano as music director of Manchester's Halle Orchestra was astute. Yes, Elder can be hilariously pompous at times; it was he who struck a blow for sanctimonious twits everywhere by refusing to conduct the patriotic songs at the Last Night of the Proms during the Gulf War. But he is an inspirational orchestral trainer, as his 14 years galvanising English National Opera showed. If anyone can dig the Halle out of its present hole (the band was one board meeting away from bankruptcy last year), he can. What is the secret of conducting greatness? When you look at what Rattle achieved with modest resources in Birmingham, and what Gergiev achieves in even more desperate circumstances in St Petersburg, one thing strikes you - that the great maestro can be far more than a musical leader. He can be the focus of a whole city's cultural aspirations, the nub of its intellectual life, even a key player in its economic regeneration. He fosters civic pride, and in turn that pride feeds back into his performances and gives them a resonance far beyond the walls of the concert hall. Yet for years most conductors have refused to look out beyond the gravy-trains of their own careers to the wider world that supports - or increasingly, doesn't support - orchestral life. Now they must change or perish. We need giants again, not time-servers and time-keepers. Berlin could send out a signal next week that would electrify the musical world. Let's hope that boldness prevails over caution. Tony Duggan Staffordshire, United Kingdom.