And thinking of Renee Fleming again, because I’ve never had enough of her and look forward to more, I remember seeing on television an interview which included Valery Gergiev who was conducting the orchestra.

They spoke as close collegial friends, and Gergiev said, “She and I have done many wonderful things together,” and I thought yes, how the best seek out the best, and collaboration is synergistic.

And I thought about how I want to know Gergiev better, because I already had him pegged for my Pantheon. How he made Bolshoi show us it means great, how Russia allowed released him to the world where he goes everywhere as well as back home and brings that always new dimension of the deep thinking conductor with the love of music and audience and everyone responds because we feel it too.

I remember Carlo Maria Giulini, one of those few visionary conductors the L. A. Phil was able to snag for a few years, who left us early because of his wife’s health, and I suspected it may also have been because the L. A. audiences were not quite ready for higher art. And I remembered the article in the L. A. Times which quoted orchestra musicians leaving after a performance, overheard discussing together the revelation of the music, “So that’s the way it goes!”

The same realization, another article in another edition of the same newspaper, when a leading ballet dancer announced her discovery that “it’s not all just numbers counting steps.”

And I thought of Ossie in Riverside, Oswald Jonas, good close friend, world renowned iconic in musicology, who revered Wilhelm Furtwangler, that visionary conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic who survived the War but lost conductorship to Herbert Von Karajan who was better at appeasement, but Ossie said with that far-away look in his eyes of the memory still with him of Furtwangler and the vision that encompassed his orchestra so that in playing Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” they all sighed and cried together with one voice.

Furtwangler is in my Pantheon too.

And Gergiev in another interview announced his favorite composer of the 19th Century as Tchaikovsky, and in the 20th, Prokofiev, and I don’t disagree.
We all have our lists.

I’m so pleased when someone on my list confirms my choices with their own.
We may live in diminished times, but there’s life in us yet.

As Mehitabel sings to Archy in the Cockroach Opera we should revive so we all can share it.