Sergiu Celibidache and the Eternal Moment‪.‬

When Sergiu Celibidache died on 14 August 1996, there were few notices of his passing in the North American press and certainly nothing like the fanfare accorded Sir Georg Solti's demise. In Europe, however, the Romanian conductor had been an icon for classical music connoisseurs as well as the subject of much controversy. The antithesis of Glenn Gould, Celibidache preferred the concert hall to the recording studio, and once suggested that the experience of listening to music on tape was akin to sleeping with a picture of Brigitte Bardot. IF, in pursuit of this enigmatic conductor's signature style, one hunted out the occasional critical comment on his early vinyl discs, one usually discovered less than laudatory judgements. In The Record Year of 1952, Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor opined that three Mozart symphonies with Celibidache and the London Philharmonic "suffered from sleepy tempi" and that a Tchaikovsky Fifth by the same forces was "affected" and "full of exaggerated tempi and dynamics." Thirty years later, when Celibidache led the Symphony Orchestra of the Curtis Institute in a concert at Carnegie Hall, New Yorker critic Andrew Porter was impressed by the training of the orchestra -- "exquisite ensemble, meticulously tempered balance, phrasing polished to a phon and a microsecond" -- but ultimately concluded that "any sense of musical impulse" was sorely lacking. Although Porter found that the "evening was extraordinary for its demonstration of the instrumental excellence that seventeen rehearsals can achieve," he missed the vitality and gaiety that should have animated the scores.