Carlos Kleiber, conducting genius or madman? This highly intelligent, well-read, sensitive and charming, disarmingly humorous, sometimes cynical and irascible man was often dismissed as an eccentric and his notorious refusals, his curiously short recording career, his complete rejection of publicity were regarded not so much as the expression of a deep-felt artistic sensitivity as the arbitrary behaviour of a talented but fl amboyant personality {u2026} When Carlos Kleiber made these recordings of rehearsals and concert performance of the overtures to Die Fledermaus and Der Freischütz for SDR in the spring of 1970 with the Südfunk Symphony Orchestra in Stuttgart{u2019}s Villa Berg, he was already more in demand as a conductor than most of his contemporaries. This DVD offers a rare glimpse of Kleiber{u2019}s often highly original attempts to verbally communicate his ideas to his musicians. Here was a man who preferred to avoid the limelight: even at the height of his fame in the mid 1970s, when he was being celebrated as a star conductor, the first signs of a slow withdrawal were already discernible.