i have to ask. "It was like regarding the harshness of a Finnish landscape from the comfort of a well-heated limousine." sums a deal with karajan. hearing his absolutely perverse recordings of mahler i still think he was ahead of his time. i think we can hear his memoire of just furtwenglers postwar romantic berlin phil playing with his studio fixed accounts, like mahlers 6th. i think the orchestra has always been so fascinating from the listeners point of view.

do you like any of karajans stuff and why?
do you fancy some mozart from the 80's?

cheers,
A

Karajan was a great Sibelian.
As a measure of his comitment to the Finnish master, Karajan insisted on including the Fourth Symphony of Sibelius in his very first opening concert as musical director of The Berlin Phil. and repeated it on his 20th anniversary. Sibelius himself remarked that Karajan was the only one who really understood his music.--kullervopete.

I am amazed that this topic as not made as much as a ripple on this forum! Oh yes, critics in there wisdom might have carped on at his Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms full of superficial slickness. But in Sibelius and particuarly the last four symphonies and Tapiola, Karajan recordings have remained yardsticks by which to judge other performances. Karajans best known recordings of Sibelius are with the Berlin P. O. made in the 1960's for DG. in fact his 1965 recording of the Fifth has been singled out for cult status. The 1968 account of No. 6 remained unmatched for years. Karajan returned to EMI in the 1980's re-recording the later symphonies and this time including the 1st and 2nd. His final Sibelius recording was the 1984 'Tapiola' perhaps the finest since Beecham.--kp

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Karajan in homage at the graveside of Jean Sibelius.

Karajan was a great Sibelian, one of the best. I find his interpretations of other composers (Beethoven, for example) to be lacking anything interesting to place them at the top of the heap. But he really must have had a connection to Sibelius; even Sibbe once remarked that Karajan was the only conductor that understood his music, but I'm sure the master made similar comments about anyone who championed his art.

Karajan's 5th from 1965 on DG is certainly one of the most intense 5ths ever recorded. His 1984 Tapiola is also exceedingly excellent. And Karajan recorded my favorite version of Finlandia on EMI in the 1970s with the Berlin P.O.

And am I not the only one who thinks Karajans' name look like Karjala (Karelia) in Finnish?!?!

It seems to me that Karajan's star (and that of most other megaconductors of his generation and earlier) is falling. At some point he will go from being a yardstick to being just an historical curiosity.
That's not in any way a criticism, just a reflection of the fact that we are all getting older and the younger generation, for whom Karajan was always a figure from the past, evidently finds such conductor cults quite alien. (Odd when you think what happens in pop music.)

Karajan an historical curiosity? well I wonder Andrew.
Robert Kajanus has been dead for 75 years, but his reading of the Third Symphony in particular is still a bench-mark by which to judge subsequent recordings. I might be an old fuddy duddy, but just as historic recordings on vinyl can thrill me to the core, so the great maestro's of yester-year seemed to have qualities that are missing today. So many of todays conductors seem to have been mass produced on a conveyer belt. Of course we have a few exceptions, but where are the Toscanini's, Barbirolli's and Beechams?--kp

Oh yes, I quite agree that these interpreters are among the greats.
But we fuddy-duddies are in a minority these days. Regrettably.
You ask where the Toscaninis, Barbirollis and Beechams are? That was my point: they are long dead and the values they stood for have also passed on.
Nowadays the conveyor belt is in fashion (sounds painful, doesn't it?).

I'm not an old fuddy duddy (I'll be 30 in November) but I agree with Pete about the "conveyer belt" of conductors that are being produced today.

Of course, I was not around to personally witness the likes of a Karajan, Beecham, Toscanini, Furtwangler, etc., but their recordings prove they each had a unique take on music. I like that. I like a conductor who imprints a little bit of themselves on the music; it's exciting to hear a familiar work interpreted in just such a way that it makes it like hearing it for the first time.

I think the same can be said of the orchestras of yesteryear as well.

Tapkaara is so right. Listening to a Beethoven Symphony, you could tell whether Furtwangler, Toscanini or Karajan was on the podium. These maestro's might be dead but I think that there recordings will survive as long as classical music. They will never in my view become merely historical curiositys. In the conducting world of today we have never had so many charlatan's.--kp

The conveyor belt is a very true system these days for musicians in general, but I think there are some conductors yet who would defy it... Osmo Vänskä comes to mind: while not being radical in the way of Toscanini or Furtwangler, he's still finding something new in the old classics, especially in Sibelius, even in Beethoven. So I wouldn't rule out any new conductors being great in the manner of the older generation.

And besides, why would anyone want another Toscanini or Furtwangler or Beecham? They're on record. To replicate their performances would be rather derivative to my mind, which is not creative and therefore stagnating the core of music itself. Then again, so does the conveyor belt method.

People are smart though, right? I'm sure that down the line there'll be more people who can find something new and innovative in something as ridiculously over-played and -recorded as a Beethoven symphony. Happily enough, I think Sibelius still has quite a bit more fertile soil left for interpretations.

So, Karajan... I've not heard any of his Sibelius recordings, but I'd imagine it's intense (I've heard his Tchaikovsky, anyway, and that's intensity to the hilt). I want to get his recording of the fourth; that's the one Sibelius approved himself, was it not? If so, which one do you all think is the "best"? (objective, I realize, yes, but still I like opinions )

I think Vänskä is one of today's truly great conductors. I think he has a definitive style (rugged clarity).

Yes, Karajan was a great Sibelian, Violist. Definitely seek out what you can. You also must give Karajan's 5th a whirl too...pretty powerful stuff.

I'm going to stir the pot a little and play devil's advocate in that I'd like to concur that specifically Karajan (and not necessarily the other conductors mentioned in this discussion) may well end up being a historical curiosity, and there may be some justice in that. The point being in my mind that the huge pile of Karajan's recordings do not stand up to many of their counterparts and contemporaries in terms of quality and interpretation. Karajan dug himself into a bit of a hole by recording so many things so many times... it's impossilbe for all or even most of the recordings to be first-class. Secondly, in my opinion, Karajan's interpretations are weird, with inconsistant tempos and odd balancing. I also find the Berlin sound that he was trying to cultivate as a weird mixture of provinicial idiom, cosmopolitan warmth and a lot of out of tune playing.

So the reason I concur with his potential "future-historical-curiosity" status is this: Every classical music lover for generations to come will always be aware of The Karajan, through his monumental recorded legacy and there will always be an awareness of the legend of his (possibly former) cult status . The weirdness and curiosity of it all might arise from the fact that future listeners will wonder HOW such a thing came to be, since they may find (like me) that his recordings aren't really that good.

I was careful in an earlier post to make clear that amongst todays 'conveyor belt' conductors, there are exceptions and World Violist is correct in singling out Osmo Vanska, who in some respects is the finest Sibelian of his generation.

When I posed the question 'where are the Toscanini's, Barbirolli's and Beechams? I was not looking for replicas of these giants! but for conductors of superlative musicianship combined with qualitys of individuality, charisma and character. All atributes that the Beechams of this world possessed.

As regards Herbert Von Karajan, and in answer to maestro Kurki, I can only speak with conviction on his Sibelius legacy. Karajans Sibelius will in my view stand the test of time. He clearly had a deep afinity for the Finnish master. His recordings of Symphonies 4, 5 and 6 are among the finest ever comitted to disc and his final Tapiola is his crowning achievement.

The recording of the fourth that Sibelius so admired was undoubtedly Karajans first account of this masterpiece in around 1953 with the Philharmonia Orchestra and produced by the great Walter Legge. If you dont mind early mono sound, then seek this out. But seriously all of Karajans Sibelius 4 recordings will satisfy.-kp

I just realized the mediocrity of my posted question about Karajan's Fourths... the 1953 one was the only one made while Sibelius was alive, so it was the only one he could've approved of... haha.

I can agree with Kurkikohtaus about Karajan becoming a potential historical curiosity... except, of course, for some of his more remarkable recordings (of which I would place his Tchaikovsky recordings of the 1960's, which are truly magnificent; and, if his Sibelius stands up to the immense praise I've seen everywhere, then that too). His Brahms, though (which I have from the '70s, I think), is uniformly pretty terrible, though I must say the Second symphony is better. On the whole, though, the Brahms cycle has everything Kurki mentioned: superficial slickness, some really bad intonation, etc.

I must say he was still a really good conductor, but... not among the greatest.

Don't get me wrong: videos I've seen of Karajan in live performance are absolutely fantastic. He is just as mesmerizing as his legend makes him out to be, a fantastic performer and interpreter.

But recordings are not necessarily about that. When one sets out to make a recording, he is producing a document that will be subjected to immense scrutiny in a way that a performance never will. Because Karajan's approach to recordings was very much that of a commercial conveyor belt, I simply can't see how most of his recordings can be anywhere nearly as good as those other conductors and orchestras that really, really take the time to study a piece and produce a document. Certainly there are many Karajan recordings out there that are excellent, but for every one of those I have found 3 or 4 others that not only are not excellent, but that I intensely dislike for the reasons that I mention above.

It is not a lack of skill or musicianship that puts him in my "bad books" as a recording artist, but his approach. 4 Beethoven cycles? Two Mahler 9ths within a few years of each other? Etcetera? I find all of this megalomaniacal.

Watching Karajan video's, one thing about his style puzzles me. Why did the maestro conduct with his eyes mostly closed and rarely looking at the orchestra.

I would have thought that some eye contact with the musicians was essential during a performance. Indeed facial expression can convey as much as a baton.--kp

Another part of his mystique and personality. You are right in that eye contact and facial expressions are very important tools for most conductors. But Karajan had an immense power in bringing the orchestra to him instead of "going out" to the orchestra. He presented his inner vision of the music and people had no choice but to follow.

Oh yes, Karajan's conducting with his eyes closed... well, I personally feel an immense amount of his power as a conductor coming from his arms and hands. I mean, honestly, have you ever seen a conductor be that expressive in his/her arms? Just the concentration of it all is tremendous, I think. That, I think, is the key to the sound he could potentially coax out of an orchestra, because it's exactly that, a coaxing. He doesn't beat the music black and blue like Bernstein or treat it like a well-oiled machine as did Reiner; he let it flow through him and the orchestra, and his arms and hands show every bit of it.