Things seem to have got a bit stuck between Rob McK asking for a list of contemporary conductors whom readers would rate as the equal of the old school maestros, and Nick B suggesting that while there is still the potential for contemporary conductors to be great, current circumstances tend to militate against it.

While wishing to remain as neutral and impartial as possible, I offer two lists for consideration.

The first list, published 4 years ago by a well-known but often divisive American critic, is of "The 10 Greatest LIVING Conductors (for the moment)" and introduced with "great conducting is not a thing of the past". It consists of (in no particular order, as far as I know): Manfred Honeck, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Herbert Blomstedt, Leonard Slatkin, JoAnn Falletta, Theodore Kuchar, José Serebrier, Andrew Litton, Michael Tilson Thomas and Vladimir Jurowski. (MTT has of course since died.)

The second list, published online in January this year in affiliation with the BBC Music Magazine, is from a survey of "100 of today’s top conductors to name three who shaped their own artistry", and in descending order the top 21 are: Carlos Kleiber, Leonard Bernstein, Claudio Abbado, Herbert von Karajan, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Simon Rattle, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Arturo Toscanini, Carlo Maria Giulini, Pierre Boulez, Rafael Kubelik, John Eliot Gardiner, John Barbirolli, Ferenc Fricsay, George Szell, Bernard Haitink, Georg Solti, Pierre Monteux, Marin Alsop, Yevgeny Mravinsky and Eugene Ormandy.

While I detect some trans-Atlantic bias in both lists, may I suggest that the first is more contestable as it is an individual opinion rather than the collective view of the second. Two other observations are that there is no common conductor's name between both lists, and that the second list appears to evenly cover about 100 years of conducting history, with three of those named still active, tending to infer there was no 'golden era', at least according to that cohort.

And so back to the first list, and without now wanting to set off a furious debate as to who should be in or out to support/deny the original proposition that there was indeed a 'golden era' of conducting, may I suggest that the extremes might be to either accept or reject the lot or, without agreeing necessarily who should be there, that it would be possible to form such a list from the conductors currently active on the world stage.