to download - International Classical Artists

KARAJAN AND THE VIENNA
PHILHARMONIC IN LONDON
‘A packed and raving audience attended last night to
Herbert von Karajan and the Vienna Philharmonic in the
Royal Festival Hall’ reported Neville Cardus in The
Guardian on 7 April 1962. The hall was certainly packed.
And perhaps by the end we were, indeed, ‘raving’ after
Karajan and this most distinguished of opera orchestras
had offered a glowing account of Wagner’s Meistersinger
Prelude (sadly not preserved) by way of encore.
In 1934 Cardus had written of the Vienna Philharmonic
‘in all the absorbed mastery of its art’ giving glowing
performances of symphonies by Mozart and Brahms under
the direction of Bruno Walter. Such visits had, alas,
remained a rarity. Little wonder, then, that this 1962
concert had about it something of the air of a state visit.
Karajan’s presence added a further dimension. The
Vienna Philharmonic has no principal conductor but its de
facto head is the Director of the Vienna State Opera, a
position Karajan had held since 1957. His repertory, during
a seven-year reign which has since acquired the reputation
of a golden age, ranged from Monteverdi to Pizzetti. A
fabled staging of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, which
had opened some weeks previously, and new productions
of Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal were particular highlights.
Something of that superbly wrought Wagnerian sound
culture can be heard in this London performance of
Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony.
There were other points of interest too. Karajan with the
Vienna Philharmonic was a rather different conductor from
Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic. Deeply versed in the
Vienna Philharmonic’s interpretative traditions and
distinctive sound quality, he was more inclined to fashion
his Vienna performances from within, rather than impose
2
them from without. He could also be a very different
conductor live from the one whose finely honed studio
recordings sold in their millions round the globe.
As a Mozart interpreter Karajan had much in common
with Bruno Walter. His true mentor, though, was Richard
Strauss, the classicising romantic whose reading of the
‘Jupiter’ Symphony Karajan’s closely resembles in both
tempo and internal modelling. A recording exists of Karajan
rehearsing the slow movement of the ‘Jupiter’ in Berlin in
1970. From the very first note, a muted F in the first
violins, he requires a particular colour and sustained
beauty of sound. At bar 11, after the lower strings have
played one of the most heavenly six-note phrases in all
Mozart, punctuated by demisemiquaver flurries in the
violins, he intervenes. ‘No, gentlemen, you get that on
every single recording! It’s fine as an exercise in precision
but it’s horrible. Please now: ardent and profound.’ In the
movement’s coda, a further skirl of demisemiquavers for
flutes and bassoons is said to be too ‘automatic’. It must,
says Karajan, be ‘like a flurry of tiny wavelets on a smooth
sheet of water’. As Maynard Solomon writes in Mozart: A
Life: ‘Such moments wait to be discovered: they are
transitional, passing references to pure beauty, captured for
an instant before they sink back into the relative quotidian.’
The performances of both the Mozart and the Bruckner
symphonies are quicker here than on any of Karajan’s
studio recordings. (A reflection, possibly, of the Royal
Festival Hall’s notoriously dry acoustic.) They are also freer
in places and given to a number of astonishing build-ups
of power. Otto Strasser, who was a member of the Vienna
Philharmonic from 1926 to 1967 and who led the second
violins during this concert, told the present writer, ‘In the
actual performance, especially in operas when he directed
with open eyes, an unbelievable power and tension
radiated from him. I always saw him from very close at
hand: the muscles of his conducting arm were often as
tense as they could be. He suffered sometimes from
painful cramps in the hand, which he overcame with great
difficulty. He never spared himself when standing on the
rostrum.’ Strasser also recalled how in rehearsal Karajan
mixed rigorous analysis with telling eloquence. He recalled
a number of phrases from a Karajan Bruckner rehearsal.
‘The upbeat here, please, especially arduous.’ ‘The
beauty of this passage must be heard to lie in its sense
of resignation.’
In 1962 audiences beyond the borders of
Austro-Germany knew little of Karajan’s Bruckner. With the
exception of his epic 1957 Berlin recording of the Eighth
Symphony, his celebrated opus of Bruckner recordings
dates exclusively from the years 1966–89. Perhaps it
comes as no surprise, then, that this London account of the
Seventh Symphony, played by the orchestra Bruckner
himself had known and written for, came as something of
a revelation.
‘Noble Height in Bruckner: Vibrant Vienna
Philharmonic’ ran the headline over a review in London’s
Daily Telegraph. ‘London has not heard a Bruckner
performance of this quality for years,’ wrote critic Donald
Mitchell, who singled out for particular mention Karajan’s
mastery of the long phrase and his ‘quite special sense of
musical continuity’. For some reviewers it was the majestic
unfolding of the symphony’s outer movements which took
their breath away. For Mitchell it was the slow movement:
in particular the superbly built climax and its brooding
coda, Bruckner’s threnody for the dead Wagner, where the
music-making, Mitchell suggested, was ‘undoubtedly
touched by interpretative genius’.
Richard Osborne
KARAJAN ET LE PHILHARMONIQUE DE
VIENNE À LONDRES
“Une salle comble et délirante entendit hier soir Herbert
von Karajan et le Philharmonique de Vienne au Royal
Festival Hall”, écrit Neville Cardus dans The Guardian
du 7 avril 1962. La salle était certainement comble. Et
peut-être étions-nous vraiment “délirants” à la fin, après
la superbe lecture du Prélude des Maîtres Chanteurs de
Wagner donnée en guise de bis par Karajan et son
orchestre lyrique des plus distingués (mais
malheureusement non conservée).
En 1934, Cardus avait évoqué les radieuses
interprétations de symphonies de Mozart et Brahms
données sous la direction de Bruno Walter par le
Philharmonique de Vienne, “dans toute la maîtrise
concentrée de son art”. De telles visites étaient hélas
restées rares. Il n’est donc pas étonnant que ce concert de
1962 ait eu un peu des allures de visite d’État.
La présence de Karajan y ajoutait une dimension
supplémentaire. Le Philharmonique de Vienne n’a pas de
chef principal, mais son chef de facto est le directeur de
l’Opéra d’État de Vienne, fonction que Karajan occupait
depuis 1957. Son répertoire, au cours d’un règne de sept
ans qui, depuis, s’est fait une réputation d’âge d’or, allait
de Monteverdi à Pizzetti. Une mise en scène légendaire de
Pelléas et Mélisande de Debussy, donnée pour la première
fois quelques semaines auparavant, et de nouvelles
productions de Tristan und Isolde et de Parsifal furent en
particulier des temps forts. Un peu de cette culture sonore
wagnérienne superbement ouvragée s’entend dans cette
interprétation londonienne de la Septième Symphonie
de Bruckner.
Il y avait d’autres aspects intéressants aussi. Karajan
avec le Philharmonique de Vienne était un chef assez
3