On Friday and Saturday, one of the world’s great conductors brought one of his orchestras to the Proms. The Latvian conductor, Maris Jansons, is one of the few living conductors whose name quickens the pulse. Jansons is incapable of dullness or routine. Even the most hackneyed pieces sound fresh under his baton. The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra is a cultured, refined orchestra. In combination with Jansons, who has recently become its principal conductor, it is resuming its place as one of the world’s best.

The label ‘world’s greatest’ is, however, less of an accolade than it used to be. It is, no doubt, the wont of every generation to look back at the past with an over-egged fondness and to be too damning of current standards. There are certainly wonderful conductors doing their thing today. But the musical titans – the Leonard Bernsteins, the Herbert von Karajans and the Carlos Kleibers - are no more. The age of the conductor who imposed his will on an orchestra, and woe betide any mere orchestral player who did not conform to the demands of the maestro, has disappeared. In its place are conductors who see themselves not as dictators but as primus inter pares.

Although it would be silly to argue that the quality of music making today is worse than it once was – technical standards are higher than ever, poor acoustics can be improved where before they were set in stone, and there are glorious performances available in concert halls across the world – something has certainly been lost: the indefinable quality which separates the first rate from the immortal.

Even revered contemporary conductors such as Claudio Abbado and Christoph von Dohnanyi are – to be blunt – little more than glorified time beaters, who are lauded for their ability to fuse an orchestra into one rather than for the extra spark which lifts music into the stratosphere. The Cleveland Orchestra, which von Dohnanyi used to conduct, was regarded with awe for the unity of its ensemble and the perfection of its pitch. Its performances, however, were so perfect that they were utterly soulless.

When the Argentinian conductor, Carlos Kleiber, died last month at the age of 74 it really did signal the end of an era. Quite apart from his bizarre behaviour – to describe Kleiber as eccentric would barely begin to describe a man who refused at any point in his career to commit himself to a future engagement and would sometimes simply turn up at an opera house and announce that he felt like conducting that night – Kleiber was the last representative of the line of conducting giants who dominated twentieth century music.

He was acknowledged by almost everyone as peerless. Mark Elder, the current principal conductor of the Halle Orchestra, described Kleiber as “head and shoulders above the rest of us, the best conductor in the world.” No one who heard him conduct will ever forget it. I was lucky enough to hear him conduct Verdi’s Otello. I can recall almost every phrase today, more than twenty years on. The opening few bars, when Verdi portrays the tempest which greets Otello’s arrival in Cyprus, were a raging torrent of sound which felt as if the earth was opening up and swallowing everything around me. I will never hear its like again.

Inspirational conductors have always been outnumbered by the workmanlike. Today, however, the flash Harrys of the musical world – the likes of Lorin Maazel, Seiji Ozawa and Zubin Mehta – are rewarded with jaw dropping fees as style triumphs over substance.

There are a few exceptions. Maris Jansons, Valery Gergiev and Sir Simon Rattle are all, above all, musical. They are indeed capable of transcendent performances. But there remains a nagging doubt even with today’s finest. Will their performances still be revered by future generations in the way that recordings made by the likes of Bernstein and, from a still earlier era, Toscanini and Furtwangler, are today?

I doubt it. I recently selected a few hundred from my thousands of CDs to put onto my iPod. It was only afterwards that I realised I’d chosen barely a single recording made after about 1980. If I had to have only one performance of a symphony, it would almost always be one now labelled ‘historic’. In a direct comparison with their predecessors, it is difficult to think of a single interpretation from a living conductor which ranks with one from the past.

Maybe I am simply falling into the usual trap of taking today’s artists for granted. Composers who were dismissed by their contemporaries as hacks – Janacek, for example – were only recognised for their genius by later generations. So perhaps when I hear the Mahler and Beethoven interpretations of the latest conducting stars in the 2030, I will moan that they aren’t a patch on the Rattles and Jansons.