Fantasy classics: the new game

Wouldn't it be great if every 'maestro' was a Furtwängler clone, every tenor a Pavarotti and every violinist a Heifetz? And wouldn't it be boring?

NL: isn't that what so many of them aspire to? and doesn't that explain much of the public ennui with the present-day middle generation?

"Si ma tante en avait, je l'appelerais 'mon oncle'."

NL: Alternately, if my grandmother had wheels, sh coiuld have been a perambulator

Can't remember where I read this, but a reputable writer/critic once said that Elgar was musically less interesting than Simon & Garfunkel.

Elgar might not have had central-European angst, but he certainly had British angst. He suffered from depression for many years, and was at one point suicidal. See, for example:
Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Elgar, Oxford University Press, 1987).

...if Harrison Birtwistle was more like George Gershwin?

NL:
... and Gershwin were more like Trevor Nunn*...

*who made the Readers Digest version of Porgy and Bess