“Unlike sculpture, music is inevitably different in every manifestation,” writes David Patrick Stearns. “Whether huge or minute, those differences can be charted, albeit simplistically, on a continuum between two poles: objective to subjective in some parlance, classical to romantic in another. Is the conductor a conduit of the composer? Or a prism? Not everybody falls squarely into one of these camps, and when someone does, it’s not an everyday thing. Sometimes, the most freewheeling musician turns out to be anything but.”