How can one tell if a piece is being played/conducted "well"? I've listened to classical music all my life, enjoy it tremendously, yet I am incapable of pronouncing such judgements. To me, 99% of the conductors/soloist play roughly the same (at least technique-wise), and if I ever have a criticism of something, it's almost always the tempo (usually that it's too fast). People have these ferocious arguments here or elsewhere about how X plays/conducts Y badly, but Z does it right, and while it's not like any two sound interpretations of anything sound identical to me, I can never go "yep, this is being played badly". I'm sure professional musicians can and do detect more than I do and from their mouths such statements sound valid to me, but IDK, it's just hair-splitting to me by that point. Maybe I'm just an unrefined pleb.