Regarding DFD, I heard a critic on radio suggest that although he had many of his discs, they rarely came off the shelf. His reaction was that he admired DFD, but did not love his performances. With a few exceptions, I have the same reaction.
Mike
My feelings exactly. But his early Schumann and his Mahler with Furtwängler are unforgettable. To go off on a tangent, though, I am very taken by his autobiographical reflections,
Nachklang (Echoes of a Lifetime in English - the translation is said to be dodgy, though). They are very evocative of pre- and post-war Berlin, dryly humorous, without the slightest sentimentality but infused with a deep love of art and artists - in short the kind of musician's memoir that you can savour sentence for sentence (cue for a separate thread on this subject; offhand, Szigeti and Piatigorsky come to mind.)
