At the same time, Kleiber gained increasing fame on the concert podium, conducting all the major orchestras with unflagging energy and success. London heard him all too seldom, but his few appearances with the London Symphony Orchestra were red-letter occasions. However, on what proved to be his last appearance at the Royal Festival Hall, with the LSO, the reviews were so unfavourable that he refused to conduct an orchestra in London again.
He was revered in Munich and Vienna. In the latter city, he conducted the new year’s concert in 1989, an event happily preserved on video. There, you can revel in his graceful, smiling, relaxed – yet, paradoxically, closely controlled – way with the music of the Viennese waltz-kings. His manner of conducting combined a wonderful control of flow, rhythm and movement with an uncanny ability to know when to create tension and when to release it. He conveyed this to his musicians with a rare fluency of movement and a rich palette of nuance as regards phrasing.
Kleiber was said to have been haunted by the ghost of his father, who discouraged his son from making a career as a conductor. It must have been something of a love-hate relationship, as Carlos restricted his repertory almost entirely to works tackled by his father. He also used his father’s heavily annotated scores as a guide to his own interpretations, so it is no wonder that, where evidence exists on record – as in the case of Beethoven’s fifth symphony – their readings are so alike.
Kleiber’ s discography is small but select. In the operatic field, besides the video of “Der Rosenkavalier,” there is a later production of the same opera from the Vienna State Opera, though less well cast than the Munich one. In audio, only his accounts of “La Traviata” (with Ileana Cotrubas as the eloquent Violetta), fizzing “Die Fledermaus” (one on video, one on CD), “Tristan und Isolde” (with the somewhat surprising – but successful – choice of Margaret Price as the heroine) and “Der Freischütz” are all admirable.
There is also an off-the-air performance of the fabulous Bayreuth Tristan to confirm the reputation of that reading. Sadly, attempts to record “La Bohème” and “Wozzeck” proved abortive because of Kleiber’s wilful behaviour, which led Deutsche Grammophon to lose patience with its star conductor.