Herbert Von Karajan had an extremely wide repertoire, and some of the most enjoyable recordings in his Complete Decca Recordings are of lighter stuff
Herbert Von Karajan Complete Decca Recordings 33 CDs, out now
Herbert von Karajan, who died in 1989, shifted 200 million albums – an astonishing figure for a classical musician. Most music-lovers are familiar with his work with the Berlin Philharmonic during the last 30 years of his life, and these recordings are available either on Deutsche Grammophon or Warner.
Then there’s the stuff he made in London for EMI during the Fifties with the Philharmonia, which he helped turn into arguably the finest recording orchestra in the world.
So it’s easy to overlook his work for Decca with the Vienna Philharmonic from the late Fifties to the early Seventies, which now reappears in this unmissable box.
One of the attractions of this magnificent box is that there are eight complete operas (Herbert von Karajan, left, in black, conducting Luciano Pavarotti in La Bohème in Berlin in 1973)
Karajan was Austrian and worked regularly with the Vienna Philharmonic in both Salzburg, his birthplace, and Vienna from 1946 – particularly frequently during his time as artistic director of the Vienna State Opera from 1957 to 1964, from which these recordings mainly date.
The set begins with a sonic spectacular: Karajan’s 1959 recording of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, the actual one used in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
At that time, Decca was working regularly in Vienna with other conductors, of the stature of Sir Georg Solti, with whom it recorded the first studio Ring. So the engineers really knew how to capture the Philharmonic’s opulent and burnished sound in recordings.
They still sound fine today.
One of the many attractions of this magnificent box is that alongside some terrific orchestral recordings, there are eight complete operas, two of which – the Pavarotti La Bohème (1972) from Berlin and Madam Butterfly (1974) – have achieved legendary status.
The Leontyne Price Tosca (1962) and Carmen (1963) deserve equal reverence.
Karajan had an extremely wide repertoire, and some of the most enjoyable recordings here are of lighter stuff such as Peer Gynt, Giselle and the Tchaikovsky Ballet Suites, which sit alongside major symphonies by Beethoven, Brahms and others.
For me, the best of these is the only ballet he ever conducted live in Vienna, surprisingly enough Holst’s The Planets suite. The frighteningly intense war-like march in Mars has, sonically, never been bettered, 60 years after it was set down.