Karajan 1960s

Product Description ------------------- This is an 82-CD box set of Karajan s complete Deutsche Grammophon s from 1959 to 1970 (excluding opera). Now available for the first time in the United States! The box set includes; Original cover art, a lavish, richly-documented 200-page book in English, German, and French with newly-commissioned articles. With extra Karajan showcard portrait and memorabilia from the archives. Review ------ The older I get, the more I revere him Jürgen Otten interviews the Berlin Philharmonic s legendary concertmaster Thomas Brandis Herr Brandis, if we re to believe Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the subject of our interview was a demigod. Let me start off by telling a nice story. Last night I couldn t and suddenly found myself sitting in my living room in front of the TV. A concert with the Scala Orchestra and Chorus was being broadcast, conducted by ert von Karajan. It was the Verdi Requiem, one of his big numbers. I was so spellbound that I listened to the very last note, until almost half past two at night. But it was worth it: Karajan was fabulous. I don t think anyone can conduct the Verdi Requiem with such calm discipline, such coherence and concentration, as Karajan did. I once saw it done by Leonard Bernstein. He was a fidgety bundle of nerves; all you see is the conductor. Karajan was often accused of play-acting the part of the conductor, but that wasn t true at all. Still, the La Scala Chorus and Orchestra didn t thrill me as much as the performance we gave him with the Berlin Phil. You ve probably heard the famous Karajan joke. Bernstein, Böhm and Karajan are sitting together arguing who s the greatest conductor on earth. Bernstein says that God appeared to him and said, It s you! Böhm replies that that s not very likely because God appeared to him and told him, It s you! At which point ert von Karajan drily adds, I said nothing of the sort! Now, the bit about Karajan s divinity is true in that he never admitted a mistake. He just never did anything wrong. More than that, he had a unique aura that ensured him a special status. He had no friends in the orchestra; he never used the familiar form of address with any musician. And he was right not to: that way no one felt envious. Was it something like this: the demigod on one side and the orchestra on the other, separated by a scrim? No, Karajan had many human traits. One proof is a letter he sent to me on 12 March 1983 after I d announced my departure from the orchestra. He thanked me in the warmest terms for my empathy as concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic. He never expressed his feelings like that in public. But to me one thing is certain: the older I get, the more I revere him, for two basic reasons. First, anyone who s got all of Wagner s operas in his head and by that I mean both the music and the words and who conducts them all from memory has simply got to be a genius. Second, rather than conducting every Bruckner symphony like an act of worship, he viewed Bruckner as a Romantic. Besides, I don t think there s anyone today who can conduct a Bruckner Eighth like Karajan. What about the grand old men Günter Wand, Sergiu Celibidache and Eugen Jochum? Weren t they all major Bruckner conductors? I heard Karajan and Celibidache in Bruckner s Fifth and Ninth one after another, and I preferred Karajan by far. Celibidache s strength lay more in French music, in Debussy and Ravel, and in Brahms as well. Getting back to Karajan: you joined the Berlin Philharmonic as concertmaster in 1962, when he d been its principal conductor for seven years. Was anything left of the typical Furtwängler sound at that time, or had Karajan already established his own distinctive sound? He was forced to continue along the path Furtwängler had taken if only because we always entered late. There was a good reason for that: it increased the tension. Beethoven s A major Symphony, for example, always began after the beat. That came from Furtwängler, who always had such a vague beat. It wiggled down from on high? Exactly. Did Karajan have a perfect beat? He always made very round movements because he wanted to avoid rigidity. But even so his beat was clear. The German conductor with the best beat of --Jürgen Otten interviews the Berlin Philharmonic s legendary concertmaster Thomas Brandis Lord of the Baton by Klaus Geitel It s as exciting as ever and impossible to overlook: Hans Scharoun s Philharmonie concert hall in Berlin. Here ert von Karajan erected a musical monument that beggars comparison. The old Philharmonie had burnt to the ground in the war, on 30 January 1944. Shortly before the demise of this hallowed musical edifice, originally built as a skating rink, a film was made inside its walls. It featured Will Quadflieg as the orchestra s rueful concertmaster returning to wander pensively through the scenes of his earlier triumphs. These accidental images are all that remain of the building on Bernburger Strasse, a place that became my home from home beginning in autumn 1939. For 50 marks I d been able to buy a subscription ticket to the ten Furtwängler concerts in the upcoming season. At the last minute the men on the Berlin Philharmonic s subscription list had been called up and put in uniform, leaving a spot free for me. I enjoyed every minute of it. Things were no different with Scharoun s highly controversial Philharmonie at the edge of the Tiergarten, a building that stands spectacularly on what is known today as ert-von-Karajan-Strasse. That it could be built at all was basically made possible by Karajan s unflinching commitment to an architectural design that radically parted ways with every convention. When Vladimir Horowitz came to Berlin decades later, hand in hand with his wife Wanda Toscanini, she roundly procled, after a brief tour of the hall, that her husband would surely never play there. Here everyone looks down at him rather than looking up to him as it should be. But in the end Horowitz, the seasoned veteran, virtually fell in love with the hall and with his boundless rtunities to flirt with the young people seated on the concert stage. From the beginning to the end of his career with the Berlin Philharmonic, all this was and remained perfectly inconsequential to Karajan. He didn t care in the least whether the audience looked up to him or not. The only thing he cared about was that all his motions were clear, distinct and unerring to the musicians on the concert platform. That was sufficient. He was amazingly devoid of vanity. Brilliance for its own sake was not his cup of tea. His performances had to be as gripping as possible; nothing else mattered. He detested any form of chumminess with the audience or anyone else. He probably felt more like a guardian of the music he d selected, analyzed, rehearsed and was now bringing to life, eyes closed in rapture. His baton alone guided the musicians on to the sole correct path he wanted them to take. No other viewpoint was tolerated beneath his artistically eloquent thumb. He was a musical dictator of genius. But he wasn t born that way, nor did it fall into his lap. It had cost him infinite effort and labour before suddenly one day, for the sole purpose of annoying Furtwängler, the newspapers spoke of The Karajan Miracle . Herr K. , as Furtwängler called him, grew to become a veritable bugbear to the elder man. When Karajan was a highly successful general music director in Aachen, Heinz Tietjen, the managing director of the Berlin State Opera, perspicaciously retained him for his famous company in the German capital. As if that weren t enough, in late October 1938 he let him conduct Wagner s Tristan und Isolde, the fons et origo of musical profundity, and a work that every conductor concerned about his reputation inevitably cled prima facie as his personal property. To assign Tristan to, of all people, a barely 30-year-old upstart, the youngest general music director in Germany, and this at the Berlin State Opera, was taken by many as a slap in the face to Berlin s musical hierarchy. Standing at the pinnacle of that hierarchy for over fifteen years had been Furtwängler, --by Klaus Geitel

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