NORMAN STINCHCOMBE REVIEWS A NEW BOX SET OF HERBERT VON KARAJAN'S 1970s CONCERT RECORDINGS WITH THE BERLIN PHILHARMONIC 

Live in Berlin 1970-1979: Berlin Philharmoniker / Herbert von Karajan (Berlin Philharmoniker Recordings 20 CD / SACDs) ★★★★★
Herbert von Karajan was acknowledged as one of the great conductors of the 20th century in the opera house, the concert hall and on disc, selling 300 million LPs and CDs. He was appointed chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1956 and under his leadership it became acknowledged as the world's finest and the combination led to Karajan being dubbed "General Music Director of Europe".  Their partnership ended acrimoniously in 1989 shortly before his death and while there had always been a small cadre of dissenting voices there now came a critical backlash. Some objections were personal as in Karajan's association with the Nazi Party although conductors like Bohm, Knappertsbusch and Furtwangler (infamously photographed shaking hands with Hitler) and soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf never received equal opprobrium. Some critics disliked what they saw as the cult of personality surrounding Karajan, often pictured pursuing his hobbies of skiing, yachting, driving his turbo-charged Porsche or piloting his own Lear jet plane. Critics devoted to vinyl did not like his enthusiasm for new technology as when, on hearing Sony's prototype compact disc he declared, "all else is gaslight", and his pioneering advocacy of filmed opera and concerts, now universally accepted. Then there were musical objections: he and the Berliners smoothed away music's hard edges, it was too legato and verging on blandness. In the criticism of Norman Lebrecht, for example, vitriol verges on hysteria, before toppling into arrant nonsense. He denounces Karajan for "homogenizing" music and reducing it to, "a seamless line of artificial beauty that owed less to the composer's invention than to the conductor's intent on manufacturing a recognisable product". Karajan is criticized for recording multiple Beethoven symphony cycles because they "meant one fewer chance for alternative interpretations". Although it did not stop recorded cycles, at the same time as Karajan's, from Abbado, Bernstein (twice) Blomstedt, Bohm, Dohnanyi, Haitink (twice), Hogwood, Jochum (three times), Kletzki, Kubelik, Leinsdorf, Loughran, Maazel, Masur, Muti, Norrington, Sanderling, Solti, Steinberg, Szell, Suitner, Tilson Thomas and Weller. Too often when Karajan is discussed, bias and prejudice overcome reason and even simple fact-checking.
This luxury new box set on the orchestra's own label gives the listener a chance to reassess these criticisms and the merits of the Karajan and Berlin partnership for themselves. These are stereo recordings of twenty concerts at the orchestra's home, the Berlin Philharmonie, made between 1971-1979, the era that Tobias Möller, in one of the three excellent essays included in the set's accompanying hardback book, rightly calls 'The Golden Seventies'. The recordings were made for radio broadcasts by the Rundfunk im Amerikanischen Sektor (RIAS) and Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) and digitally transferred from analogue sources from the archives of  Deutschlandradio and Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg. The tapes were converted at the Emil Berliner Studios to 192 kHz / 24-bit files and are available for download or on compact disc as part of the box set and this review was made by listening to the hybrid discs in SACD format via Marantz's 'Ruby' SACD player and Marantz PM10 amplifier. These are genuine live recordings not the contemporary "live" ones which are actually a combination of concert and rehearsal sessions patched together to cover blemishes and mishaps. So there are occasional errors that regular concertgoers experience, I picked up an occasional fluff from horns and woodwind. It says a lot for the players' brilliance that there are so few in twenty hours of demanding music. The remastering has worked well, extraneous noise has been excised and these recordings have a wide stereo spread and depth.
What of the music making itself? In fifty years of listening to Karajan's recordings, with the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic and Philharmonia made between the 1950s and 1980s, both opera and orchestral, I have come to several conclusions which have been grounded in many hours of comparative listening. Leaving aside opera, beyond the remit of this review, I believe Karajan to be a great conductor of Bruckner, Richard Strauss and Sibelius. He was a fine conductor of Beethoven, although he never bettered his 1962 cycle of the symphonies which contains a performance of No.4 in B flat major which I have never heard equalled for dynamism and soaring spirit. His Haydn, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Brahms and Tchaikovsky symphonies are also satisfying. I never cared much for his big-band Mozart symphonies which, like those of his contemporary conductor Karl Bohm, are shorn of repeats. This is crucial in the great fugal finale of the Symphony No.41 'Jupiter' of which there are two recordings in this set (Concert 27, Disc 4 and Concert 35 Disc 12). Elegance and beauty abound but Mozart's sometimes daemonic energy is lacking. He was a brilliant conductor of French music and also light music - a master of Johann as well as Richard Strauss, and  his 1987 live 'New Year's Concert from Vienna' is perhaps the finest in that august series. This set also shows the breadth of Karajan's repertoire. A cursory glance at the contents is an immediate rebuttal of Lebrecht's claim that Karajan was, "Reactionary by nature, he stuck to the classical and romantic mainstream, excluding non-tonal music and ulterior styles of performance." Here are concert performances of works from the Second Viennese School - Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern - and recent pieces by Krzysztof Penderecki (1967), Gerhard Wimberger (1975) and Werner Tharichen (1975).
Karajan was an obsessive re-recorder of his core repertoire which his deriders claim was just for commercial motives but while this may sometimes have been the case - record companies are, after all, commercial enterprises - it does not tell the whole story. Performances often differ in small but crucial ways, changes of tempo and emphasis, which reveal aspects and facets, tiny details of a work. This is what Möller calls the "endless reassessment of his own interpretations [which] was an integral part of Karajan’s working style." There are several examples of Karajan's constant interrogation of the score in this box set. I started by listening to Concert No.32 (Disc 9) from September 1975 devoted to two Richard Strauss works Karajan recorded several times: 'Metamorphosen, Study for 23 solo strings' and 'Also sprach Zarathustra'. The first is Strauss's late masterpiece, composed during the final months of World War II as Strauss's beloved threnody for German culture as the composer saw the opera houses which had witnessed his greatest triumphs flattened by Allied bombers, weaving in references to 'Tristan' and the funeral march from Beethoven's 'Eroica' symphony. Karajan was a superb interpreter of this work aided by the refined, burnished autumnal glow of the Berlin strings. His 1983 digital recording is my first choice but this live concert version is intriguingly different with the central Più allegro section faster, more intense and more passionate, the strings biting, as if the younger Strauss had temporarily taken over. The concert version and 1984 digital recording of 'Zarathustra' are almost identical but the live 'Das Tanzlied' is quicker, brighter and much lighter on its feet. In 'Ein Heldenleben' (Concert 35, December 1976 Disc 12) again the performance here and in Karajan's 1959 and 1986 recordings are pretty consistent, except for 'Des Helden Gefährtin' (The Hero’s Companion). The Berliners' concertmaster Michel Schwalbé is faster, flightier and more mettlesome in this musical portrait of Strauss's beloved, if termagant, wife Pauline de Ahna. The Strauss recordings show the virtues of digital remastering. In 'Zarathustra' the extreme low bass, from the right speaker, has imposing weight, the opening brass fanfare is well distanced in the centre of the stereo spread, and the bitonal ending, high strings extreme left, growling basses extreme right, is spot on. The contrast between the concert Sibelius Symphony No.4 (Concert 40, January 1978 Disc 17) and Karajan's 1965 studio recording is more extreme. The 1965 broad expansive Largo (12.00) is tautened (10.22) while the swift Allegro finale (9.21) becomes a slower, grander peroration (12:16). When Karajan recorded Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' in 1964 Stravinsky savaged it, saying that one part was played in  'tempo di hoochie-koochie'. This live version (Concert 24 January 1971 Disc 1) is much faster, the playing sinewy, tougher and, when required, brutal. The recordings are poles apart. The two performances of Bruckner's mighty Symphony No.5 from 1972 (Disc 3) and 1976 (Disc 11) are nearly identical but the former gives a little extra time to build the majestic fugal finale. The performance of Bruckner's Symphony No.4 (Disc 8) is one to cherish - listen to the magnificent Berlin horns, led by Gerd Seifert, in the scherzo's rousing hunting calls.
There are many hours of pleasurable listening in this box, with plenty of variety. There are strong performances of Karajan's  repertoire: symphonies by Berlioz, Brahms, Dvorak,  Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann and Tchaikovsky. Mahler is represented by 'Das Lied von der Erde' with some ravishing playing and fine singing by Agnes Baltsa and Hermann Winkler. Karajan was a sensitive concerto accompanist and there's an outstanding Sibelius Violin Concert (Christian Ferras), plus Mozart's Piano Concerto No.23 (Jean-Bernard Pommier) and Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No.1 (Mark Zeltser) and Brahms' double concerto with the orchestral players Thomas Brandis (violin) and Ottomar Borwitzky (cello) as soloists. There are beautiful sensuous performances of Debussy and Ravel, a scintillating Mussorgsky 'Pictures', biting Bartok 'Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta', and Karajan and the Berliners reveal, contrary to popular prejudice, that the music of Berg (Three Pieces from the Lyric Suite for string orchestra and Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6), Schönberg (Pelleas und Melisande) and Webern (Five Movements for String Orchestra, Op. 5) can be beautiful and beguiling as well as challenging. With the rise of the original instrument / historically informed performance movement Karajan's Bach Brandenburg Concertos (No.1 and No.3) and Vivaldi (Sinfonia for Strings in B minor, RV 169 “Al Santo Sepolcro”)  have themselves become historical curiosities. The set's accompanying book is stylish and informative well illustrated with period photographs, none of which I'd seen before, and for those who have not read  Richard Osborne's masterly monumental biography 'Herbert Von Karajan: A Life in Music' his essay included here, 'Karajan: The Man and the Musician' is an excellent taster.