Herbert von Karajan
Live in Berlin, 1970–1979
Berliner Philharmoniker
rec. live, 1971-1979, Philharmonie, Berlin
Stereo
Berliner Philharmoniker BPHR250571 SACD [20 discs: 1447]

This review is of discs 11-20 of the new boxed set from Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings. If you haven’t already done so, can I suggest you read John Quinn’s review of discs 1-10 first? John and I have worked in parallel, but independently, and his piece will give you the context for the set and the story of the first half of the decade.

On Sunday 12 December 1976, the Berlin Philharmonic and Herbert von Karajan performed Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5 at the Philharmonie. The day before, in the same building, Karajan had set down his justly celebrated account for DG. Getting the measure of this work, arguably Bruckner’s most cerebral and complex, had been a long journey. Karajan’s 1954 version with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra (Orfeo) is arguably one his least successful early recordings, where his famous control of structure and ensemble seems absent at times. Even the version on Disc 3 of this set, recorded four years before, has a slight ‘work in progress’ feel. In particular, Karajan’s handling of the final movement’s fugue in 1972 seems more effortful. He’s concerned above all with clarity of voicing. By 1976 that’s almost a given and there’s a grandeur to the approach, which gives an almost lapidary feel to the contrapuntal writing. It’s fascinating too to observe the difference in the live performance with the studio version recorded 24 hours before. One immediately senses a greater degree of momentum at the concert, which is sustained throughout, but particularly in the Adagio, where Karajan is over two minutes faster, as he is in 1972. This perhaps speaks less of the spontaneity inspired by live performance, then, and more of a judgement about the calibration required for something captured for posterity and repeated listening on the one hand, and something more ephemeral on the other. It’s a fascinating comparison and a demonstration of the insights afforded by the set in a work which was never as central to Karajan’s repertory as some of the other Bruckner symphonies.

The 1972 performance of Bruckner 5 was the perhaps somewhat earnest offering for the Silvesterkonzert that year. In 1976 (Disc 12) there was more varied fare: Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 and Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. Varied, and carefully considered. In his brilliant essay which accompanies the set, Peter Uehling talks about Karajan’s ‘concert dramaturgies’, the conductor’s desire to establish connections and insights in his programming. This concert was a fine example, a pairing that marks the crowning of Mozart’s work as a symphonist and a self-referential view from Strauss on his composing career so far. I’ll confess to having been taken by surprise by Karajan’s Mozart. This account of the Jupiter — an apparently settled interpretation by this stage given its similarity to the same work earlier in the set — is both symphonic and precise. There’s no undue pomposity but nevertheless the work is imbued with a welcome majesty and tenderness. There’s no lack of drive either: the way Karajan handles the finale being genuinely gripping, never once blurring Mozart’s intricate lines in his path to the finish. Interestingly there’s much more of a sense of reflection on accomplishment at the start of the Strauss. You have a sense at the beginning of a story being related, rather than happening in real time. But this is a clever dramatic trick. Just as we’re thinking that we know what we’re going to get after a few bars of the gloriously measured opening, the reflective and slightly luxurious aura gives way to something much tauter, the narrative vivid and irresistible, with ‘Des Helden Walstatt’ more visceral than I remember it from any of Karajan’s recordings. Talking of aura, there’s a slightly haloed sound to Michel Schwalbé’s brilliant violin solos in ‘Des Helden Gefährtin’ which feels a bit odd for a live recording — it’s not as if Schwalbé required any artificial assistance!

The second of the set’s three encounters with contemporary music comes on Disc 13. Gerhard Wimberger’s Plays for 12 solo cellos, wind and percussion was a recent work in 1977, having had its Salzburg premiere five months earlier. Karajan took practically no interest in the music of his immediate contemporaries, and one has to ask what guided him here, who advised him. The answer, whatever it was, doesn’t justify the result. This is for the most part unoriginal and derivative music, including an awkward passage which seems to aspire to the character of a Swing number without possessing any of the idiom’s wit or fluency. It’s simply very effortful throughout. The Berlin Philharmonic’s cellos play magnificently, of course, but that only deepens the sense of disproportion between the resources deployed and the material’s intrinsic worth. How different is the Berlioz Symphonie fantastique which shares the disc. Even though Karajan recorded the work for DG twice (1964 and 1975), I’d never particularly associated it with him, and this performance came as a pleasant surprise. There’s a real sense of melodrama here which is not misplaced. Karajan places the work squarely in the world of nineteenth-century theatre, relishing the colours and the spectacle but building to something more serious too. One is reminded that for all the polish of the studio recordings, it’s in performances like this that the drive and dynamism of Karajan’s conducting is most immediately felt.

The third contemporary work in the set makes the Wimberger seem like a masterpiece. Composer and timpanist Werner Thärichen’s Batrachomyomachia (‘The Battle of the Frogs and Mice’), a concerto for two solo timpani, voice, chamber choir and orchestra, is a truly Frankensteinian concoction. According to Thärichen’s reminiscences, the work was provoked by Karajan’s claim that Thärichen’s colleague Oswald Vogler could play more loudly. Thärichen decided to settle it by composing what amounts to a timpani duel dressed up in pseudo-archaic clothing. It feels self-indulgent from the off, with its mannered, forcedly ironic baritone solo in mock Greek and ludicrous tuned percussion writing. The booklet notes tell us that Karajan claimed he would use no more than six sentences in the entirety of an average rehearsal. One wonders whether on this occasion he was rendered altogether speechless. I don’t regret the work’s inclusion, or that of the Wimberger, because of the picture they give us of Karajan’s activities during this period. But I’m not sure either composition has a worth beyond that.

The Sacre du printemps which shares Disc 14 is another matter entirely. It starts with the smoothest of smooth bassoon solos, and one braces for what that might portend — a Karajan Sacre in which everything angular and barbarous has been smoothed into orchestral luxuriance. But the opening conversation and chattering has an urgency which builds with real cumulative force. When the music is pulled back to the bassoon solo again the effect is shockingly disjunctive. And then those beating strings: listen to what is going on above them, an almost mechanical ostinato that gives the passage the quality of something closer to machine music than ritual dance. The two live Sacres in this set make for a revealing comparison. The earlier 1971 account smooths out the score’s percussive angularity in favour of orchestral sheen; here, six years on, the edges are much sharper. The Sacrificial Dance is formidable, its final pages built with a remorseless accumulation of force. I suspect Stravinsky would have been a lot more respectful of this account than he was of Karajan’s 1963 DG recording.

The all-Brahms concert of 21 October 1977 (Disc 15) yields mixed results. The Double Concerto is an enjoyable account, Ottomar Borwitzky and Thomas Brandis well matched and playing with conviction. They generate an infectious warmth which makes it all the more disconcerting that this quality seems to have entirely evaporated by the time we reach the Symphony No. 2. Here the playing is polished but functional, a curious synthetic quality permeating the whole. How sympathetic, one has to ask, was Karajan to the Brahms symphonies? In theory, Brahms’s expansive textures should have been a natural home for what Uehling identifies as Karajan’s ‘sonority-centred’ approach of the 1970s. But this performance tells a different story: Karajan plays the finale as a spectacular but hollow closing number, leaving one feeling that the music is all surface. It’s a curious disappointment.

On 4 January 1978, Karajan devoted an entire concert to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (Disc 16)*. That feels like a good artistic choice: the work needs room to breathe, and a concert given over entirely to it suggests a seriousness of intent. The inevitable comparison is with Karajan’s DG recording made four years earlier with Christa Ludwig and René Kollo, and what’s immediately striking is how much more alive and satisfying this live performance is. There’s more momentum and acuity in Karajan’s conducting, and he seems more engaged overall. Some of this can be attributed to the soloists. Hermann Winkler sings with a more open, penetrating tone than Kollo, and Karajan responds in kind, finding a greater urgency and definition in the tenor movements. Winkler also adopts a better line than Kollo; he sounds as if he’s coming to the work as a new piece, where Kollo can’t quite throw off a familiarity which at times sounds jaded. Agnes Baltsa is magnificent. She brings the sensibility of an actor to ‘Der Abschied’; you feel this is life and death for her. Possibly so carried away was she that her very final entry — the last ‘ewig’ (farewell)— is late. The result is that she is singing as Mahler indicates, ‘Ganzlich ersterbend’ (completely dying away), over the very final chords of the piece. I have to say I found this moving: the in-the-moment adjustment Baltsa was forced to make feels serendipitous and transcendent. I am so glad it didn’t disqualify the performance from release.

One of the best performances in the whole collection comes on Disc 17: Sibelius’s Symphony No. 4 in A minor. There’s an immersive sense of darkness here, an elusive bitterness which Karajan manages to materialise more successfully than other conductors I’ve heard in this work. He seems to welcome the symphony’s experimentalism and doesn’t try to impose a sense of coherence on it where none exists. The sound he conjures from the orchestra is almost unnerving at times — angular and stark, the string sound much closer to the Second Viennese School than the First. Nor does he make any attempt to offset or resolve the many countervailing tugs of the final movement. It fades in a bleakness of sensibility which is hard to bear but is shatteringly authentic. It feels as if this was music that meant a great deal to Karajan.

I don’t know how calculated Karajan’s Konzertdramaturgien was for this concert, because Beethoven’s Seventh followed the Sibelius, and the fit between the two works isn’t obvious. But considered on its own terms the Beethoven is very much of interest. I found it a fascinating experiment. Karajan seems to be much more concerned with timbre and colour than he is with rhythm. Indeed, it’s the sheer intensity of sound which becomes the governing principle. Even the finale, whose character is surely defined by its rhythmic drive, takes on a weighty, almost suspended quality. So many performances these days seem constrained by an obsession with the work’s rhythmic centrality. Karajan shows there is another way. You might not agree with him, but you have to hear it.

The programme for Disc 18 (4 January 1979) is one of the most thought-provoking in the set. It starts with Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, continues with Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra and concludes with Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony. Let me take the Bach briefly. This sounds like a sort of anti-historically informed protest performance which conclusively makes the case for symphony orchestras not attempting this repertoire. Whilst Karajan’s Vivaldi right at the start of the set is genuinely fascinating in its creative reimagining of sonority, this just feels misconceived. However, Karajan live at the harpsichord will no doubt be something completists have to have.

The Berg, by contrast, is a triumph. I don’t know that these Three Pieces have ever been invested with such a carefully assembled, precise sound world. There is a Mahler-like monumentality to the sound, but it moves — never static or self-regarding. It seems that what Karajan found uncomfortable in Mahler he could embrace in Berg: the darkness, the extremity, the premonition of catastrophe, but without the sentimentality — and without what Karajan himself saw as the sometimes thin line between the sublime and the ridiculous in Mahler. Berg gave him a licence for that extremity within a more rigorously controlled formal framework. This was music that touched something very deep in Karajan. He once said of performing it: ‘…it takes up all your mind and you need two or three days to recover from it.’ I can absolutely believe that. I don’t know that I have ever heard such a sustained tension as in this performance. All the while it feels as if we are on the verge of something cataclysmic. The Marsch in particular feels like what Karajan had in mind for the opening of his recording of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. He draws back from it in that recording, but somehow the Berg gives him permission for a particular sort of ferocity. It feels as if the striking Thomas Scheibitz cover art for this set — with its fractured, angular forms in blues and blacks, its sense of something figurative dissolving into abstraction — was designed with this music in mind.

It’s curious that Karajan’s Dvořák on the same disc appears to be the antithesis of his Brahms. Where the Brahms Second felt almost alienating, the Dvořák Eighth is engaging and warm. Curious too that he seems to be after a less plush sound than in the Brahms, but this doesn’t stand in the way of very affecting middle movements: a beautifully shaped Adagio and a fleet, graceful, shimmering Allegretto grazioso. The fourth movement has terrific energy, Karajan cleverly making accelerations within phrases to accentuate the feeling of momentum, doing so in an ever more driven way as the movement progresses. Very exciting, and a welcome shift of scene after the devastating Berg.

The concert of 27 January 1979 (Disc 19) again saw some really thought-provoking programming. The first half is the highlight. Webern’s Five Movements for String Orchestra are rendered with an almost exaggerated care, as if the players were carrying porcelain across a room. The music feels as if it flowers across its brief span and then in the last movement its withering away is almost the most beautiful thing about it. This is some of the finest playing in the whole set. There’s a fragility and concentration here that I find more compelling than the studio version’s sumptuous polish, and which suits music of such exposed vulnerability.

I feel more positively than Uehling about the Schumann Fourth which follows. This performance is essentially Karajan coming to grips with the surprisingly intellectual qualities of this work much more successfully than in his 1971 DG recording. The juxtaposition with the Webern surely affirms the questing approach Karajan adopts: he doesn’t try to tidy up the Schumann, and again, as with his Sibelius Four, he’s content not to impose a sense of structural integrity by striving for oversimplification. There’s an interesting lineage here, I think, across the second half of this set — Schumann refracted through the earlier works where Karajan has been happy to embrace ambiguity and angularity: the Sibelius, the Berg, the Webern. Something of that astringency has seeped into his reading of the Schumann to genuinely liberating effect.

One can see the Konzertdramaturgien thinking once more in the placement of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto as the final work, the spectacular Romantic concerto as a closing number. In Mark Zeltser, it’s somehow as if Karajan wanted a soloist who would complement rather than dominate the orchestra. An interesting approach: ‘worthy’ rather than overwhelming, as the booklet puts it, and the contrast with the Schumann is one of colour certainly, but also of substance, the confected nature of the concerto laid bare by its proximity to the genuine article.

The final disc brings us to 25 November 1979. There is not much to add about the Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 to my earlier remarks on Karajan’s Bach, except to say that the absurd tempo choice for the Menuetto seems to indicate a real desire to provoke a reaction. However, if you wanted the final proof of the worth of these recordings, of what the live dimension brings to Karajan’s interpretations, the Eroica provides it. Here Karajan has applied his almost forensic grasp of Brucknerian structure to a much more compact and intellectually challenging work, and it succeeds magnificently. Uehling argues that the piece ‘flows along’ but is ‘curiously sleek’, that Karajan’s obsession with Bruckner’s expansive forms had blinded him to Beethoven’s need for musical discourse. I hear it differently. The structural integrity is remarkable, yes, but so is the colour; and Karajan’s mastery of the symphony’s rhetoric is formidable, particularly in the first two movements, where there’s a finely judged combination of bombast and acuity in the first movement — the public grandeur of the gestures counterbalanced by a fierce precision in the detail — and a profoundly affecting rendering of the Marcia funebre, grief worn as a public mask but no less real for that. In the finale, the musicianship on display is glorious. The movement races along, the voicing and characterisation superb, the contrapuntalism thrilling. It’s as if the compactness of Beethoven’s writing concentrates rather than constrains Karajan’s instinct for building a multi-layered realisation of the score’s sound. In less precious terms, this Eroica sounds like an end-of-season celebration at its conclusion, not something taking place on a freezing November evening.

I’ve not had the physical set to examine, but from the photos and PDF it looks a handsome production, helped considerably by the Scheibitz cover art I mentioned earlier. The documentation is nicely varied and of high quality. Richard Osborne’s essay is both touching in its description of his relationship with Karajan and typically penetrating on aspects of the conductor’s music-making. Tobias Möller provides a helpful contextual note, placing the 1970s as the golden period for the conductor-orchestra relationship. And then there is Uehling’s essay, which, as is probably obvious, I feel I’ve been in dialogue with ever since I read it. Like Osborne, Uehling is a biographer of Karajan, and that familiarity, combined with a wonderful ear and a genuine literary and artistic sensibility, makes this one of the best pieces of music criticism I have read for a long time. As is always the case with the Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings label, no effort has been spared to deliver the best possible sound. The original radio engineers of Sender Freies Berlin and Rundfunk im Amerikanischen Sektor no doubt did a very good job in the first place in the by now familiar environment of the Philharmonie, but the remastering effected by Sascha von Oertzen, Jennifer Nulsen and Philipp Nedel has clearly been meticulous.

A slightly tired question often asked at this stage of a review is ‘who is this set for?’ Tired perhaps, but still a good catalyst for reflection. I suspect most of the set won’t be made available separately but nevertheless considering the constituents of the last 10 discs, I think there is some clear categorisation. There are performances that everyone should hear regardless of their views on Karajan: the Berg, the Webern, the Mahler, the Sibelius, the Schumann and the Eroica; then, very fine accounts of Mozart, Strauss, Bruckner and Stravinsky; some genuinely interesting if not ‘library’ takes, like the Beethoven Seventh and the Dvořák; and completists-only material, the Bach, the Wimberger, the Thärichen, and, I’m afraid, the Brahms Second. But, of course, the whole point of this set is its integrity, the portrait it offers, which is as revelatory as the earlier Berlin Philharmonic/Karajan box of recordings from 1953–1969, though in a different way. This is Karajan and the orchestra at the height of their relationship. They could do anything they wanted, and this is what they chose. A set, then, to be taken as a whole, and one which rewards that commitment richly.

Dominic Hartley

Other review: John Quinn

Availability: Berliner Philharmoniker

Contents
All recordings are from broadcasts by Rundfunk im Amerikanischen Sektor (Radio in the American Sector, now Deutschlandradio) unless otherwise stated

Disc 1
Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)
Sinfonia for Strings in B minor, RV 169 “Al Santo Sepolcro” (ca 1730)
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D minor, Op. 47  (1903/04, rev 1905)
Christian Ferras (violin)
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
Le sacre du printemps (1911-13)
rec. 25 September 1971
A recording by Sender Freies Berlin (Radio Free Berlin, now rbb)

Disc 2
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847)
Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 56 “Scottish” (1841/42)
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1891-94)
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Daphnis et Chloé, Orchestral Suite No. 2 (1913)
rec. 19 February 1972

Disc 3
Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)
Symphony No. 5 in B flat major (1875/76, rev. 1877/78)
rec. 31 December 1972  Disc 4
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551 “Jupiter” (1788)
Peter Illych Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 (1888)
rec. 8 September 1973

Disc 5
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Symphony No. 7 in B minor, D 759 “Unfinished” (1822)
Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020)
Capriccio for Violin and Orchestra (1967)
Leon Spierer (violin)
Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881)
Pictures at an Exhibition (1874) (Orchestrated, 1922, by Maurice Ravel)
rec. 17 February 1974

Disc 6
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 23 in A major, K. 488 (1786)
Jean-Bernard Pommier (piano)
Arnold Schönberg (1874– 1951)
Pelleas und Melisande op. 5 (1902-03)
Symphonic poem after Maurice Maeterlinck’s play
rec. 25 September 1974 

Disc 7
Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Sz 106 (1936)
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)
Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95 “From the New World” (1893)
rec. 8 December 1974

Disc 8
Alban Berg (1885-1935)
Three Pieces from the Lyric Suite for string orchestra (1928)
Anton Bruckner
Symphony No. 4 in E flat major “Romantic” (1874, rev. 1878 / 80, 1887 / 88. 2nd version)
rec. 20 April 1975

Disc 9
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Metamorphosen, Study for 23 solo strings (1944-45)
Also sprach Zarathustra, Symphonic Poem, Op. 30 (1895-96)
rec. 25 September 1975


Disc 10
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Sinfonia concertante for four winds in E flat major, K. 297b (1778)
Karl Steins (oboe), Karl Leister (clarinet), Gerd Seifert (horn), Manfred Braun (bassoon)
Jean Sibelius
Symphony No. 5 in E flat major, Op. 82 (1914 -15, rev. 1916, 1919)
Finlandia, Op. 26 (1899-1900)
rec. 16 October 1976


Disc 11
Anton Bruckner
Symphony No. 5 in B flat major (1875/76, rev. 1877/78)
rec. 12 December 1976

Disc 12
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551 “Jupiter” (1788)
Richard Strauss
Ein Heldenleben op. 40 (1897-98)
Michel Schwalbé (violin)rec. 31 December 1976

Disc 13
Gerhard Wimberger (1923-2016)
Plays for 12 solo cellos, wind and percussion (1975)
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869)
Symphonie fantastique, Op. 14 (1830)
rec. 25 January 1977
Disc 14
Werner Thärichen (1921-2008)
Batrachomyomachia op. 55 (1975)
Concerto for 2 solo timpani, voice, chamber choir and orchestra
Werner Thärichen (timpani I), Oswald Vogler (timpani II), Walton Grönroos (baritone)
Kammerchor Ernst Senff
Igor Stravinsky
Le sacre du printemps (1911-13)
rec. 25 September 1977
A recording by Sender Freies Berlin (Radio Free Berlin, now rbb)

Disc 15
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Concerto for Violin, Cello and Orchestra in A minor, Op. 102 (1887)
Thomas Brandis (violin), Ottomar Borwitzky (cello)
Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73 (1877)
rec. 21 October 1977

Disc 16
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Das Lied von der Erde (1908-09)
Agnes Baltsa (mezzo-soprano), Hermann Winkler (tenor)
rec. 4 January 1978

Disc 17
Jean Sibelius
Symphony No. 4 in A minor, Op. 63 (1909-11)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92 (1811-12)
rec. 28 January 1978
A recording by Sender Freies Berlin (Radio Free Berlin, now rbb)

Disc 18
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major, BWV 1048 (before 1721)
Michel Schwalbé, Leon Spierer (violin), Wolfram Christ (viola), Ottomar Borwitzky, Eberhard Finke (cello)
Friedrich Witt, Rainer Zepperitz (double bass)
Herbert von Karajan (harpsichord)
Alban Berg
Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6 (1913-15, rev. 1929)
Antonín Dvořák
Symphony No. 8 in G major, Op. 88 (1889)
rec. 4 January 1979
A recording by Sender Freies Berlin (Radio Free Berlin, now rbb)

Disc 19
Anton Webern (1883-1945)
Five Movements for String Orchestra, Op. 5 (1909, 1928-29)
(Arrangement of the String Quartet)
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Symphony No. 4 in D minor, Op. 120 (1841, rev. 1851)
Peter Illych Tchaikovsky
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 in B flat minor, Op. 23 (1874-75)
Mark Zeltser (piano)
rec. 27 January 1979

Disc 20
Johann Sebastian Bach
Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F major, BWV 1046 (before 1721)
Thomas Brandis (violin), Hansjörg Schellenberger (oboe I), Burkhard Rohde (oboe II), Heinrich Kärcher (oboe III)
Gerd Seifert (horn I), Dieter Fischer (horn II), Philipp Mol (harpsichord)
Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 55 “Eroica” (1802-04)
rec.  25 November 1979

*Ralph Moore reviewed this as part of his survey of Das Lied von der Erde, observing that it was available to be heard only on YouTube but not on any major label; so at least it is now here.