In his original post Des Hutchinson made reference to his daughter's opinion and it is revealing that in all the 'great conductors' named so far in this thread not one has been a woman. Great conducting and great conductors of both genders are thriving, thankfully never more so. What is dying, sadly not yet dead, is the conviction and reverence of the idea of great conducting as exclusively the preserve of men and what's more men who too often were allowed to indulge with impunity in working practices that ranged from the merely pathetically puerile and boorish to the criminal. Some listeners may have no qualms about all this as long as they can be taken "to the tops of the highest mountains….”. As a listener interested in music not mountaineering I am not one of them. The infuriating, despairing life story alone of Antonia Brico stands as brutally stark evidence to the fact that we will never know how many great conductors we were deprived of hearing in the past simply because they made the mistake of having been born a woman in a world that deemed that waving a baton was obviously something women could not do as well as men. Play an instrument or sing, yes of course, but wave a baton no no. As music lovers and more importantly as human beings, spouses and parents, I think we should all do our bit to put a nail in the coffin of the idea of great conducting as something that is exclusively the preserve of the past and a past inhabited exclusively by men.