Karajan In Vienna: Music Of Mozart - Overture To The Marriage Of Figaro&Strauss - Metamorphosen_音乐专辑
Karajan In Vienna: Music Of Mozart - Overture To The Marriage Of Figaro&Strauss - Metamorphosen
表演者: Hervert von Karajan/Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
流派: 古典
专辑类型: 选集
介质: Audio CD
发行时间: 1999
唱片数: 2
出版者: Memoir Records
条形码: 0077774989220
专辑简介
No conductor’s posthumous critical reputation has fallen into such dizzying decline as Herbert von Karajan’s. One influential writer has him hysterically marked down as having single-handedly destroyed the classical recording industry, whilst even restrained commentators often find themselves struggling with that famous Berlin Philharmonic ‘sheen’. Various aspects of Karajan’s private life, from his jet-setting penchant for fast cars, aeroplanes and yachts, to wild and unsubstantiated claims about his relationship with the Nazis, have also proved fertile hunting grounds for the tabloid journalist.
Yet away from all the critical infighting Karajan’s recordings continue to sell to an adoring pbblic in quantities that no other conductor in history can remotely rival. His unique combination of tonal and intonational beauty coupled with an electrifying emotional range illuminated music ranging from Mozart and Beethoven to Schoenberg and Webern. Yet prior to his halcyon period in Berlin during the ‘60s and ‘70s, the great majority of Karajan’s recordings were made either in London with the Philharmonia or with the Philharmonia in Vienna. Indeed there are those who strongly feel that his immediately post-war, Toscanini-inspired recordings with the latter represent the very pinnacle of his achievement.
Karajan’s contact with the Vienna Philharmonic can be traced back as far as April 1929 when just three months after making his public debut, the budding 2l-year-old conducted a single performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome in Salzburg with an orchestra that included two players from the Austrian capital’s most illustrious orchestra. They reported back to base with stories of a phenomenal new conducting talent.
Just over five years later on 29 August 1934 Karajan made his unofficial debut with the VPO at a private concert in Salzburg with a programme consisting entirely of French music: Debussy’s enchanting Fantaisie for piano and orchestra and Prelude a’ l’aprés-midi d’un faune and Ravel’s La valse. On I June 1937 he made his debut at the Vienna State Opera conducting Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Having made a devastating impression on players and audience alike, the ever-astute Karajan turned down an offer of a post as house conductor there. He knew his time would come.
Following the 1945 armistice Karajan’s career, not altogether surprisingly, became embroiled in post-war politics. On 15 December 1945 he was cleared to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic by the allies, even though there were some dissenting voices who felt that the decision had been taken too hastily. Literally on the morning of an ‘open concert’ with the Vienna Philharmonic (12 January 1946) the Russians stepped in and tried to prevent it from taking place. Only after negotiations with US officials was permission granted enabling Karajan to conduct that evening and then make his full debut as planned the following day (13 January). The concert, consisting of three central German classics – Haydn’s ‘London’ Symphony, Strauss’s Don Juan and Brahms’s First Symphony – brought the house down. A final planned concert for 19 January was cancelled, however, due to further Russian intervention.
Although Karajan was eventually cleared by a de-nazification tribunal of illegal activities during March 1946, the allied ban on his making concert appearances remained firmly in place. Meanwhile Karajan had met producer Waiter Legge of EMI for the first time (he would later describe him as his ‘alter ego’), leading to the signing of a three-year contract during the May. Legge was determined to get Karajan into the studio, and following some rapid negotiations with the British Foreign Office, produced the necessary documents to persuade the Americans and Russians to allow him to at least record with the Vienna Philharmonic. They made their first recording together in the September: Beethoven’s 8th Symphony. During their second series of sessions the following month they cut some Mozart in a single day (October 21) that fully captures the electrifying impact Karajan had made on the players in a very short space of time.
Rarely can The Marriage of Figaro Overture [track 1] have sounded so indomitable. Already at this early stage in his career, playfulness and frothiness were not so much abandoned as subsumed into a symphonic overview that valued structural impregnability above all else. Karajan retained a certain degree of affection for Mozart’s delightful K319 [tracks 2-5], it being one of only three nonmature symphonies he recorded in the ‘60s with the Berlin Philharmonic for DG (he omitted it from the later EMI BPO series). Again Karajan is not one to bask in radiant sunshine, rather he allows shafts of light to tellingly illuminate the occasional phrase or structural corner, thereby throwing into relief the music with which such moments are surrounded. Those more familiar with Karajan’s later style would be hard pressed to recognise this energised, highly articulate account as the work of the same conductor.
During the following year (1947) Karajan made his first recordings of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and Brahms’s German Requiem. It was during the second set of sessions for the latter in the October, that he recorded Strauss’s Metamorphosen, adding one further session at the beginning of November [track 8]. No one listening to this magisterial interpretation could possibly imagine that the piece was just two years old at the time. Without a hint of the mawkish sentimentality and ruminatory overindulgence that disfigures so many readings of this seminal masterpiece, Karajan inspires the matchless Viennese strings of the period to play with a depth of sonority and glorious sense of line to hold the listener spellbound, especially in this magnificent new transfer by Ted Kendall.
Two months later Karajan recorded some more Mozart, this time more inclined towards the dark side: the K477 Masonic Funeral Music [track 6] and the K546 Adagio and Fugue [track 7], both based in C minor. More than usual Karajan stresses the raw emotional power of this music, putting one in mind of Beethoven’s use of this, his favourite dramatic key. In an age in which the pre-Romantic impulse of Mozart’s music tends to be played down in exchange for authentic good manners, the electrifying impact of Karajan’s vision comes as something of a shock. Not even his most determined detractors could accuse him of superficial beautification after hearing this.
曲目
Karajan in Vienna
Mozart - Symphony No. 33
Marriage of Figaro Overture
Masonic Funeral Music
Adagio and Fugue K 546
Strauss - Metamorphosen
