Maybe you've lost sight of that person who is first dipping their toes n the waters of classical music? Compassion towards a beginner?
Le Baron makes some excellent points. I'm not really sure what you find in his statement to not be compassionate towards beginners. If anything, I think he offers great advice for beginners...and those who think they are seasoned listeners.
He is a standard go-to name, whilst there are/were dozens of equally good conductors.
Yes, there were many big name conductors who were promoted by the major labels who made hundreds of albums. Karajan, Bernstein, Ormandy, Solti, Szell, Maazel, and so on. What really makes Karajan better, for new classical music listeners or otherwise, than any of those other names?
I've never heard of 'infra dig' before. It's not the reason I'm not a Karajan fan, it's because he's vastly overrated and reached the point where he was standing motionless on the conductor's podium, eyes closed (probably asleep) giving a twitch of a finger now and again. And all his fans filled in the yawning gap with fawning commentary about how he had by then reached conducting nirvana and could almost telepathically control the orchestra (after having 'broke' them in rehearsal). It's pretty ludicrous.
Yes, there is a lot of daft romanticizing about the major conductors of the 20th century. There are stories about all of those conductors concerning how demanding they were. Well, if they were all so demanding, what's so special about any one of them in particular? Perhaps being demanding and direct is just part of the job whether one is recording for DG or if one is conducting some little-known orchestra in the middle of the country somewhere.
Back when the major labels were selling a lot of classical records, they would pay to send their artists to do appearances on TV and radio. They would spend a lot of money to advertise their records in relevant publications and allegedly they even wined and dined the so-called critics who reviewed recordings. Record labels like Naxos, cpo, Brilliant Classics, and so forth don't do stuff like that. They don't have the budget for it. Frankly, the major labels don't have the budget to do that stuff very often these days either. But, yeah, that marketing is a big reason why there are so many big names from that era. A Naxos conductor may not have all that paid buzz, but does it really matter? Are we here to enjoy music or to enjoy marketing campaigns?
As for Karajan specifically, he was known for being a proponent of multi-miking during recording and wanting to have a lot of input on the audio engineering even though there were far more qualified people who could have done the engineering. Some of Karajan's early recordings, like the EMI stuff, don't sound too bad aside from issues related to the age of the recordings, but his recordings from the 1970s and 1980s have pretty London (and I don't mean Decca
) sound quality, IMO. I say IMO, but I know a lot of people who agree with me on that.
What we're talking about here is somebody finding their way into classical music. It's no good suggesting they start with highly esoteric harpsichord sonatas.... at least guide people towards the known legendary recordings to begin with. In my opinion that's the best way in.
If I asked 50 Bach fans to name their favorite 'legendary' performance of, say, the WTC, I might well get 25 different responses! There are several of those Penguin type guides and I'm sure many of them recommend different recordings. Everyone has to start somewhere, yes, but getting too many outside opinions may well lead to more confusion.
Ultimately I would say just one thing to everybody: "Explore, explore....".
The problem of starting the story at Beethoven or graduating from Mozart to 'more serious' Beethoven has long been a problem in classical music. It's a position widely held on another large classical music forum populated by people who make a mortuary seem like a busy train station. In general I would say to anyone coming to classical music: listen to absolutely anything that takes your fancy. If it's Vivaldi, good. If it's Schoenberg, good. If it happens to be Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, good. I'd never do what the folks at that place do, shoving everyone into Beethoven's or Schubert and romantic orchestral Leviathans as a definition of what it means to be properly 'into classical music'.
Klassik on exploring music - There are many classical music fans who moronically believe that there are only a handful of composers and performers worth listening to and that listening to anything outside of those short lists is merely a 'guilty pleasure.' That's complete nonsense.
The good news is that I sense that a lot of younger classical music fans are moving beyond the record label marketing hype of the ~1960s. It seems to me that younger classical music fans, and savvy older classical music fans xD , are exploring classical music at places like YouTube. They might start listening to one thing, but then they click on a recommendation. That leads to more recommendations. This goes on and on, but I notice that YouTube is not shy about recommending some rather obscure classical music works. There are some excellent YouTubbers who have uploaded a lot of excellent, diverse material and some people are wise enough to follow those uploaders.
When one follows this trend, they explore a lot of music and they don't have to worry about how famous the performers are because they are just listening to the music and determining what they like about it and what they don't like. Maybe they'll even learn something from the path they've traveled and become more skilled in guiding their own adventure.
