You may be looking for later classical directors leading large orchestras, while I want earlier baroque groups focused around soloists.
As a very, very, very crude explanation . . .
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In classical music, famous directors herd big orchestras through long symphonies by Beethoven.
It's similar to a half-time show with a marching band performing massive, elegant maneuvers.
It takes a very wide camera shot to show the entire orchestra that plays that stuff.
There are whole platoons of violins, cellos, trumpets, and every other kind of instrument.
The music is written for the whole group, not any particular instrument.
So you're looking for Ozawa or Bernstein or von Karajan or Abbado and so on.
They're directors and their instrument is the baton.
The music often finishes up good and loud.
Here's a classical flash mob orchestra starting out with a single bass player and building up the Ode to Joy:
[video:youtube]
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In the earlier baroque, a dozen virtuoso musicians play shorter concertos by the likes of Vivaldi, Bach, and Telemann.
Rather than a half-time marching band, it's more like a Fred Astaire dance routine with a few other hoofers next to him.
The director may be the fellow playing the harpsichord (the piano is a later invention) for the basso continuo line.
Or the "director" may be the soloist on the violin.
You can recognize all the players, and they'd fit on a very small stage.
They play individual cadenzas.
The baroque is written with a particular instrument from that era in mind, so there are concertos for violin, cello, lute, mandolin, oboe, natural trumpet, and even the new-fangled clarinet, plus forgotten instruments like the viola d'amore.
So the baroque emphasizes the small group and the soloist.
The violinist Giulani Carmignola is fine example of the baroque director-soloist, playing with the Virtuosi of Rome, the Sonatori della gioiosa Marca, the Venice Baroque Orchestra, and Il Giardino Armonico, which all followed in the footsteps of I Musici.
I look for the baroque soloist--Heinz Holliger plays Vivaldi's thirty or so oboe concertos, Klaus Thunemann plays the nearly fifty bassoon concertos, both of them as hired guns for the string players of I Musici. I like Holliger and Thunemann's performances better than many other soloists.
The same is true for the violin pieces. There are lots of recordings of the opening movement of the first concerto of La Stravaganza, but the one that's my ring tone is the late Carmel Kaine playing with Neville Marriner's Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. She got it right, and everyone else is playing in her shade on Op. 4 No. 1:
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Of course, my crude distinction between earlier small baroque and later large classical breaks down left and right, since the composers were just writing music, not trying to fit into pigeonholes. Handel, for example, was baroque, but wrote for much larger orchestras in a more classical manner.
To close with the hopefully most outrageous illustration of the difference, the earlier baroque is more like the 8-member Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain with Jonty the bass-ukelele player whistling Bach:
While the later classical is more like Andre Rieu explaining his orchestra during Funiculi Funicula (which is actually the even later Romantic):
Regardless of genre, they're all lots of fun. Thanks for the excuse to indulge myself!
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Since that wasn't much practical use for someone looking for classical directors, my best suggestion is to switch from the radio if you can to Youtube, where you can find exactly what you want instead of what some disk jockey likes.
Now it's back to figuring out why a medical office payroll program ate itself yesterday.
