Designs for a period of reconstruction
The new Karajan Edition of Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings

A completely new view of the Berliner Philharmoniker with Herbert von Karajan: The most recent release of the Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings label issues numerous radio recordings from the 1950s and 60s for the first time. Essential works from the standard repertoire – from Mozart to Sibelius, from Beethoven to Ravel – are presented in interpretations that capture the inimitable energy of a live concert. In an essay for this beautifully-presented edition, music journalist Peter Uehling offers his own insights into the unique nature of these recordings. Here is an excerpt.

A concert’s overarching structure

Karajan demonstrated a unique grasp of dramaturgical structures when programming concerts. Listeners should try to hear complete concerts, each of which was generally recorded in its entirety. The prevailing model of overture, concerto and symphony is still frequently used today, with the difference that for the last fifty years, the opening overture is seldom by Bach or Handel, as was the case with many of these concerts in the 1950s and 1960s.

From today's perspective, Karajan could hardly be viewed as an expert in the music of Bach or Handel, but it exactly the unreconstructed nature of his approach to this repertoire lends these recordings an element of historical interest. The origins of his style of conducting in what used to be called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) is most apparent in those places where his interpretative ambitions appear to be held in check. At a time when Nikolaus Harnoncourt was bringing Baroque music to life as a form of musical discourse, Karajan favoured a relatively mechanical approach to rhythm and dynamics. Much the same is true of his Mozart: although some of his recordings are very beautiful, most notably the concerto for three pianos (one of them played by Karajan himself), and the Second Lodron Serenade (the Divertimento K 287, a particular favourite of his), there are others in which any sense of witty dialogue and rhetorical pithiness is absent, a shortcoming most keenly felt in his recording of the “Jupiter” Symphony.

Two transient new works shed particular light on the concert life of the period. One is by Rolf Liebermann, who went on to make a name for himself as an opera intendant, while the other is by the successful film composer Richard Rodney Bennett. Karajan introduced his Berlin audience to both of these composers. This is music that was not written as ephemera, even though it proved ephemeral, which inevitably raises questions. Not so Ligeti’s Atmosphères, a repertoire outlier that Karajan approached with a sensitive grasp of the work’s polyphonic textures.

At times Karajan’s programmes challenged expected norms,  perhaps most spectacularly when he placed Brahms’s Fourth Symphony at the start of a programme that ended with two of his favourite works by Debussy and Ravel, with a markedly German, clearly structured and emphatically spiritual or intellectual work offset by two strikingly French pieces, both with a real sense of flow and sensuality. The contrast between these works remains educative; only six years separated the first performance of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony from Debussy’s first sketches for his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.

Growing together

If you listen more closely to these recordings, perhaps with the impression left by Karajan’s studio recordings in mind, you will notice that conductor and orchestra are slowly growing together. This point emerges with particular clarity from a comparison between the two recordings of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony made in 1953 and 1969. In the earlier recording Karajan is still standing in front of an orchestra moulded by Wilhelm Furtwängler, despite the fact that the older conductor’s grip had loosened during the final years of his life.

In 1953, Karajan’s desire to impose his will is palpable, a desire arguably frustrated less by the orchestra’s collective resistance than by the players’ completely different sense of musical direction, which made it hard for Karajan to fully implement his ideas. His interpretation lacks roundness, and there are still places where the ensemble playing is comparatively rough. Ten years later he recorded the “Eroica” again as part of a complete set of Beethoven’s symphonies. This time, there was a greater sense of coherence. When Karajan made his later live recording in 1969, he was able to draw on the experience of the studio recording and recreate exactly the same characteristic, etherial blend in the wind section, to virtuosic effect.

Karajan’s ideas about Beethoven’s symphonies remained relatively unchanged over the decades, but there were other pieces that reveal a voyage of discovery. Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, for example, was a work that he programmed at the only concert that he gave with the then-twenty-four-year-old Glenn Gould. This was a piece that went on to become the pianist’s favourite symphony. Here it sounds both more urgent and more reckless, from an orchestral point of view, than it was in his later recordings.

There are also huge differences between Karajan’s 1974 prize-winning recording of Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra op. 31 and the live concert recording from 1969 that is included here, which was only his second performance of the piece. In the later recording the sound gives the impression of being nostalgically veiled and, as such, more in keeping with the powerful and almost Romantic rubato playing of the soloists; whereas the live recording reveals tauter and more exaggerated tempos, making the music sound more belligerent and more aggressive. Here Karajan’s interpretation of the piece is still Expressionistic in character. By 1974, he was viewing Beethoven through the lens of the Mahler recordings that he was in the process of making.

Karajan as a live conductor

These live recordings also reveal some interpretative extremes of a kind that Karajan tended to avoid in the studio. His whole aesthetic was geared to making recordings that had the status of works of art in their own right, recordings with an “objective” balance that was hard to reconcile with the spontaneity of extreme expressivity. Here, conversely, we can find a vast expressive range.

Particularly shocking is the fortissimo with which the Fate motif enters in the Andante of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. No less wonderful are the subtleties that Karajan permits himself in transitional passages or whenever he explores harmonies and sonorities such as those that are found in the famous flute solo in Ravel’s Second Suite from Daphnis et Chloé.

When Karajan was appointed as principal conductor of what was then still called the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1955, he announced that he needed “at least ten years to build up the orchestra”. This sounds barely credible when compared to today’s conditions, when contracts are signed for no more than five years and there is increasing impatience in the minds of many observers. If you assume that Karajan did not mention a ten-year period merely with the aim of justifying his lifetime contract, then you have to ask what exactly he envisaged as the goal of his work with the orchestra.

Anyone listening to Karajan’s studio recordings of the Beethoven and Sibelius symphonies from the first half of the 1960s would assume that conductor and orchestra already understood each other perfectly well before this date. But this impression derives from the cosmetic effects of editing and mixing. Only through these live recordings, rough and ready as they are, allow us to judge the ways in which conductor and orchestra gradually warmed to each other and grew together. This is a journey that is exciting to follow.