Herbert von Karajan’s 1977 Beethoven cycle appeared during the height of his fame and was embraced wholeheartedly by both press and public. Indeed, in some circles Karajan was proclaimed as the Beethoven conductor. It’s interesting to hear these recordings again 25 years later, after Karajan has long departed and much of the hype and hoopla around him has dissipated. Now with a clearer perspective we can really hear just how bizarre they actually sounded (well, some of us throught they sounded pretty bizarre in 1977, but that’s another story). From the mid-1970s on Karajan personally involved himself in the mixing and mastering process, usually preferring an artificially close perspective that simulated RCA’s Studio 8-H sessions for Toscanini. Was Karajan consciously trying to duplicate the sound of his idol? Regardless, the results of his control room manipulations are pretty consistent: a wide, flat sound stage with no depth, and loud passages that are oppressively close and congested while the quiet ones sound far in the distance–all contained within in a dynamic range that is, paradoxically, quite limited.
The Fifth Symphony best exemplifies these peculiarities. The performance itself is notable for Karajan’s energy and insistent drive and for the Berlin Philharmonic’s brilliance and smoothly polished sonority. However, Karajan’s preference for predominating string texture keeps the winds and (particularly) brass at bay, especially in the finale, where except for the opening fanfares they hardly register at all, resulting in one of the more anticlimactic conclusions on disc.
Karajan seems never to have developed a fondness for the Pastorale, as his many recordings attest, and in this one his displeasure seems most acute. He dispatches the first movement as quickly as possible, glossing over colors, rhythms, and accents along the way. The Scene by the Brook, with its muted dynamics and pureed orchestral texture, sounds more like the opening of Wagner’s Forest Murmurs.
However it’s the Ninth that suffers most from Karajan’s mixmaster-like dial twiddling. The first movement’s opening crescendo builds slowly, then leaps out at you in a manner that sounds wholly artificial. Again everything is perversely close, though this time Karajan gives undue preference to the winds, making some passages, particularly the scherzo, sound more like Vivaldi than Beethoven. The finale launches with an impressive burst of energy, but the lack of space around the sound renders it dynamically inert. The vocal contributions are well done, but nothing special–Karajan had a more enthralling group of soloists in his previous DG recording. Indeed, that version of the Ninth, as well as the entire 1960s cycle, is the one to have if you insist on Karajan’s Beethoven. However, the DG catalog contains far superior offerings, both in terms of performance and sound. These include Bernstein, Böhm, and (available in some countries) Kubelik.
