This DG Originals reissue includes Herbert von Karajan’s 1961 recording of the Mozart Requiem, with the welcome addition of a 1971 account of the Adagio and Fugue in C minor K. 546 that originally appeared alongside Richard Strauss’ Metamorphosen. Both featured on an uncannily moving LP recorded in 1969 by a small contingent of leading Berlin Philharmonic string players in a church near one of Karajan’s homes in St. Moritz. This performance of the Requiem is tautly sprung and in a way quite impressive, with massive choruses and weighty orchestral playing; but as an interpretation it probably will leave you cold. For example, Karajan takes the Dies Irae sequence as something akin to Bruckner; there’s little sensitivity and no room for poignant reflection. There’s lots of bombast and pumped-up rhetoric, though, and a Lacrimosa that’s more an act of will than a tearful plea.
Still, choral participation from the great Wiener Singverein is magnificent, and Walter Berry’s Tuba Mirum is superb. Wilma Lipp sings with admirable control throughout, and her solos in the Domine Jesu movement are fine. But Karajan’s view of the piece always goes for super-aggrandizement of the big, public pronouncements, and now that the outstanding Peter Schreier account (1983) with the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Leipzig Radio Chorus, and a better matched solo quartet is available at midprice (it’s digital, and the Philips 50 disc also includes the Coronation Mass and Ave verum Corpus), there’s really little to be gained from this hard-sounding DG offering. If you can afford to be extravagant, then you’ll get a strong, searching account of the Adagio and Fugue in C minor; but why hasn’t DG reissued in full the program from which it was taken?
