Kleibernomics

Something on The Internet makes a point about opportunity cost and the relationship between economic and psychological well-being and includes a Carlos Kleiber anecdote! Let's link to that. (via Tim Mangan.)

Music and undergraduate-level economics, together at last.

The best part is Herbert van Karajan's description of Kleiber, quoted from this 1990 article about Kleiber in the Guardian:

He tells me, "I only conduct when I am hungry." And it is true. He has a deep-freeze. He fills it up, and cooks for himself, and when it gets down to a certain level then he thinks, "now I might do a concert." He is like a wolf.

I don't believe in the "There Is a Single Best Recording" paradigm of classical music listening, but I might make an exception for Kleiber's recording of the Beethoven Fifth and Seventh Symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic. Really, it's the "If You Only Listen to One Classical CD in Your Life Make It This One" disc.

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One wonders, "Say, here's a recording I think is the 'If You Only Listen to One Classical CD in Your Life Make It This One' disc. I wonder who is rating it like one or two stars on Amazon?" Let us hear the rebuttal by one Mr. P. Fitton of Oldham, Manchester, UK:

if this is the greatest classical recording/performance of all time - as seems to be the general consensus - then shouldn't the tympani sound a bit more like tympani and rather less like someone banging a door with a mallet? The kettle drum sound is appalling throughout, which might matter a little less if they weren't so ludicrously prominent in the mix or if their owner didn't seem to have had, at times, only an approximate idea of when his job description required him to hit the things. I take it this is the same player who marred some of the Maazel/VPO Sibelius cycle some years earlier? Either way it sounds like he's building a shed.

He has some further criticisms, but they're less hilariously crotchety.