GREATEST CONDUCTORS
1. Herbert Von Karajan
2. Leonard Bernstein
3. Wilhelm Furtwangler
4. Karl Bohm
5. George Szell
6. Otto Klemperer
7. Claudio Abbado
8. Eugene Ormandy
9. George Solti
10. Bruno Walter
11. Neville Marriner
12. John Eliot Gardner
13. Carlos Kleiber
14. Michael Tilson Thomas
15. Fritz Reiner
16. Leopold Stokowski
17. Colin Davis
18. Charles Dutoit
19. Adrian Boult
20. Bernard Haitink
21. Andre Previn
22. James Levine
23. Rafael Kubelick
24. Christoph Von Dohnanyi
25. Leonard Slatkin

GREATEST CLASSICAL PIANISTS
1. Vladimir Horowitz
2. Arthur Rubinstein
3. Sergei Rachmaninoff
4. Joseph Hoffman
5. Sviatoslav Richter
6. Van Cliburn
7. Arthur Schnabel
8. Claudio Arrau
9. Alfred Cortot
10. Vladimir Ashkenazy
11. Maurizio Pollini
12. Alfred Brendel
13. Martha Argerich
14. Glenn Gould
15. Emil Gilels
16. Georges Cziffra
17. Aldo Ciccolini
18. Leif Ove Andsnes
19. Krystian Zimerman
20. Jean-Yves Thibaudet

GREATEST CLASSICAL VIOLINISTS
1. Jascha Heifetz
2. Yehudi Menuhin
3. Itzhak Perlman
4. Nathan Milstein
5. Joseph Szigeti
6. Isaac Stern
7. Salvatore Accardo
8. Maxim Vengerov
9. Joshua Bell
10. Anne-Sophie Mutter

Tentative revision:

GREATEST CLASSICAL VIOLINISTS
1. Jascha Heifetz
2. Yehudi Menuhin
3. Itzhak Perlman
4. Isaac Stern
5. David Oistrakh
6. Nathan Milstein
7. Fritz Kreisler
8. Joseph Szigeti
9. Eugene Ysaye
10. Salvatore Accardo
11. Mischa Elman
12. Zino Francescatti
13. Henryk Szeryng
14. Leonid Kogan
15. Arthur Grumiaux
16. Maxim Vengerov
17. Joshua Bell
18. Anne-Sophie Mutter


New list:

GREATEST CLASSICAL GUITARISTS
1. Andres Segovia
2. Agustin Barrios
3. Julian Bream
4. Ida Presti & Alexandre Lagoya
5. Celedonio Romero
6. Miguel Llobet
7. John Williams
8. Narciso Yepes
9. Abel Carlevaro
10. Christopher Parkening
11. Manuel Barrueco
12. David Russell
13. Pepe Romero
14. Angel Romero
15. Kazuhito Yamashita
16. Goran Sollscher
17. Alirio Diaz
18. Roland Dyens
19. Jose Rey de la Torre
20. Julio Sagreras
21. Paul Galbraith
22. Eliot Fisk
23. David Starobin
24. Sharon Isbin
25. Jorge Morel

did you compile these yourself, Brian? well done.

these are lists i've posted before; you may use them as a reference, if you want... i think my best work is the guitarists' list since i am most intimately familiar with the instrument and its history, whereas my other lists are more of the point of view of listener and generally a dilettante. (-:

great pianists:
1. Sviatoslav Richter
2. Vladimir Horowitz
3. Artur Rubinstein
4. Glenn Gould
5. Gyorgy Cziffra
6. Sergei Rachmaninov
7. Claudio Arrau
8. Jozef Hofmann
9. Arturo Michelangeli Benedetti
10. Maurizio Pollini
next level: Alfred Cortot, Emil Gilels, Artur Schnabel, Vladimir Sofronitsky, Edwin Fischer, Martha Argerich, William Backhaus, Myra Hess, Solomon Cutner
next level: Josef Lhevinne, Dinu Lipatti, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Van Cliburn, Jorge Bolet, Sergio Fiorentino, Alicia de Larrocha, Walter Gieseking, Radu Lupu, Evgeny Kissin, Sergio Tiempo, William Kapell, Wilhelm Kempff, Marc-Andre Hamelin, Daniel Barenboim, Murray Perahia, Frederic Rzewski

(btw i was recently rewatching maybe the most famous soviet comedy of all time - "operation Y and shurik's other adventures" - from 1965, and noticed for the first time that in one of the conversations/jokes the name of Van Cliburn is very casually mentioned... and i thought: how cool, and how interesting)




great guitarists:
1. Andres Segovia
2. Agustin Barrios
3. Julian Bream
4. Ida Presti & Alexandre Lagoya
5. Celedonio Romero
6. Miguel Llobet
7. John Williams
8. Narciso Yepes
9. Abel Carlevaro
10. Christopher Parkening
11. Manuel Barrueco
12. David Russell
13. Pepe Romero
14. Angel Romero
15. Kazuhito Yamashita
16. Goran Sollscher
17. Alirio Diaz
18. Roland Dyens
19. Jose Rey de la Torre
20. Julio Sagreras
21. Paul Galbraith
22. Eliot Fisk
23. David Starobin
24. Sharon Isbin
25. Jorge Morel
+ Regino Sainz de la Maza, Leo Brouwer, Ben Verdery, Jason Vieaux, Oscar Ghighlia, Hubert Kappel, Alvaro Pierri, Tilman Hoppstock, Scott Tennant, Ricardo Cobo, Eduardo Fernandez, Jorge Caballero, Vicente Gomez, Norbert Kraft, Sergio and Eduardo Abreu, Pavel Steidl, Remi Boucher, John Holmquist, Gerald Garcia, Denis Azabagic, Li Jie, Ana Vidovic, Liona Boyd, Vladimir Mikulka, William Kanengiser, Andrew York, Maria Luisa Anido, Louise Walker

(i also have a list of great classical guitarists from the past two centuries, which is of course less accurate because of lack of recordings)



great violinists:
1. Jascha Heifetz
2. David Oistrakh
3. Isaac Stern
4. Yehudi Menuhin
5. Itzhak Perlman
6. Fritz Kreisler
7. Eugene Ysaye
8. Nathan Milstein
9. Mischa Elman
10. Zino Francescatti
11. Joseph Szigeti
12. Henryk Szeryng


i don't know exactly what criteria you use, but in any case, my suggestion would be to definitely include Kreisler, Oistrakh, Ysaye and Stern. i can't imagine a top 10 violinists' without these names. Vengerov, Bell, and Mutter are brilliant young players but there is no way they carry the same weight in the world of classical violin as those giants, by virtually any criteria.

for violinists, i'll also mention Leonid Kogan. i was recently watching a soviet biopic of Niccolo Paganini (which is excellent, btw), and it featured a clip of Kogan playing Paganini's original Stradivarius... i enjoyed it very much and was reminded again of Kogan after many years. maybe he's just a slight level below the transcendent geniuses of Oistrakh and Heifetz, but he's up there and should get a mention if we expand the list beyond 10 or 20.

not sure how the likes of Sarasate and Joachim should be considered given their relatively tiny amount of recorded material, but i think if we include any and all violinists who've been recorded (like i did with my guitarists' list), they'd also deserve a place near the top, somewhere in the top ten probably.

more big names to be considered: Arthur Grumiaux, Christian Ferras, Toscha Seidel, Jacques Thibaud, Efrem Zimbalist, Pinchas Zukerman (would be even higher on a violists' list, i'd think), James Ehnes and Leonidas Kavakos (both of whom belong on the same level as Bell and Vengerov), Michael Rabin, Ida Haendel, Josef Hassid, Ivry Gitlis, Tossy Spivakovsky, George Enescu, Ginette Neveu, Ruggiero Ricci, Kyung-wha Chung, Oscar Shumsky, Shlomo Mintz, Aaron Rosand, David Nadien, Gidon Kremer
my own familiarity with these last names ranges from quite well to just-discovered-them (-:

George, I didn't make these lists; they must have been made by either Guy or Eric. I don't know what the criteria was, but I would think that reputation for greatness would be the best basis for such a list, and that reputation would be based on a combination of technical skill, expressiveness, and how much first rate work they did.

I would have trouble making lists like these, so I think what I'll do is base any revision I make on whatever discussion takes place. Since there's no guitarists list at all, I'll just put your list in the 2nd post as the working list, and I expect I'll soon put a revised violinists list in that post too. The current list only has 10 entries, which seems pretty stingy considering how important the violin is in classical music, so I'll use your suggestions to make the list longer, and rearrange the order a bit. I might also revise the pianists list.

I put together a quick blend of the DDD list and George's list, adding 2 others that George mentioned in his post, and put the resulting list in the 2nd post.

Fantastic! This is exactly what I was going to suggest in the greatest artists thread

Glenn Gould should certainly be in the top ten? And I would advocate Kempff for the top twenty.

YES.

My 3 favourite pianists (nothing objective here):
1. Richter (for his incredible repertoire, and especially that last Schubert sonata)
2. Arrau (completely blows Cziffra's Transcendental Etudes out of the water imo, and awesome Brahms concerti)
3. Argerich (Liszt sonata, Schumann second sonata, and her Chopin and Prokofiev are awesome too)

Does anyone have any thoughts on how these 4 pianists should be ranked in relation to one another?

17. Aldo Ciccolini
18. Leif Ove Andsnes
19. Krystian Zimerman
20. Jean-Yves Thibaudet

of the four, i'd probably rate zimerman the highest (more of a subjective opinion, though, because of his championing of chopin), and the other are close. however, i would include michelangeli, sofronitsky, fischer, and argerich, before any of them. these four are giants of piano world, the kind of reputation these four younger pianists haven't quite reached. michelangeli is considered by many as the most "perfect" of all great pianists and is arguably the definitive performer of debussy, sofronitsky championed scriabin and as a pianist was regarded as the greatest by even richter and gilels,

Argerich is already on the list. Blending the current list with your suggestions, I come up with this:

1. Vladimir Horowitz
2. Arthur Rubinstein
3. Sviatoslav Richter
4. Sergei Rachmaninoff
5. Joseph Hoffman
6. Claudio Arrau
7. Arthur Schnabel
8. Van Cliburn
9. Alfred Cortot
10. Glenn Gould
11. Maurizio Pollini
12. Vladimir Ashkenazy
13. Georges Cziffra
14. Martha Argerich
15. Emil Gilels
16. Arturo Michelangeli Benedetti
17. Alfred Brendel
18. Vladimir Sofronitsky
19. Edwin Fischer

George, I take it that you think #20 should be either William Backhaus, Myra Hess, or Solomon Cutner. Any thoughts about which of the 3 is most deserving?

of those three, probably Solomon. but, i'm thinking, if our criterion for inclusion is existence of recorded material, then perhaps Ferruccio Busoni should be on the list, in which case i'd place him near the top, maybe just above or below Rachmaninov. his remaining output is tiny, but as would be expected, quite awesome.

bach: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3P8WUGIYuw
chopin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3O1yygAEc0

I'm not a huge fan of Cliburn as high as he is and I wish Kissin were higher, but the list is pretty good

I thought this Carnaval by Uchida was just excellent.
p.iii on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=527MWE8ep44
If she was on the list, would she then be the only person from Asia there?
(I mean all lists not just this one)

me neither... i think he and ashkenazy are obviously great but a bit overrated