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April 2008 ~ Issue One of BooksMonthly ~ Return to the Cover page

HERBERT Von KARAJAN

Herbert von Karajan - 1908-2008 - in this issue:

Herbert von Karajan: A Chronology

Herbert von Karajan: Celebrating the Centenary

EMI CLASSICS celebrate 100th anniversary of Herbert von Karajan

Sir Simon Rattle on Herbert von Karajan

A colleague of mine spotted my copy of Richard Osborne's biography of HvK on my desk the other day and asked: "Should I know who Herbert von Karajan is?" I smiled and replied, "only if you like classical music." He said "I do like classical music, but I've not heard of him." We then spent five minutes talking about classical music and I tried to explain what was special about him; I ended up by describing him as a "superstar". He went away most impressed, but I have to say that his interest in classical music lay in "I like that piece..."; which suggests that he's a Classic FM listener rather than a Radio 3 listener. If that sounds snobbish, it's not meant to be - I listen to Classic FM all the time, because I have an extensive collection of classical music on CD and Classic FM gives me small pieces from all genres of classical (including some pieces that definitely aren't classical, of which more later) while Radio 3 gives you whole works. At some point in the last couple of years they devoted the whole station for several days purely to the works of Bach - not my favourite composer. And Classic FM have mentioned HvK's centenary, plus all the music magazines are in full flow with memoirs and reissues of HvK recordings. But why didn't my colleague know about Herbert von Karajan, I ask myself. Here's the answer:

The difference between recorded classical music (which is where most people derive their knowledge of classical music from) and popular music (though not jazz) is that although there are cover versions of some pop songs, the nature of classical recordings is that people who are passionate about classical music come to recognise differences between performances. I don't know how many recordings of Mahler's Eighth there are, but I'd hazard a guess and say there are more than twenty available now. For Beethoven symphonies, I would guess that the number would run into many more, possibly hundreds. I remember hearing the Previn/LSO recording of Beethoven's Seventh, and thinking that I really preferred the HvK BPO recording because of the speed at which the final movement was played.

When I left BAe in the 1970s, I was given the HvK/BPO record set of the Beethoven symphonies, with this picture on the cover. It struck me then that here was a superstar, something I guessed at from the photograph alone. The recordings were stupendously good - I still prefer them to the later digital set; but at the time I knew nothing about classical superstars other than that Previn had his music night and was probably the first classical superstar in the UK music scene. Years later, when I'd had time to read about HvK and others, I realised that for the best part of a half century, two men had come to dominate classical music, HvK and Leonard Bernstein. These were the two truly great supergiants of classical music. As the years went by, I made a point of buying HvK's recordings and then reading the reviews, often by Richard Osborne, and often stating that they were benchmark recordings by which all others should be measured.

We watched the 1973 Easter performance of Mahler's Resurrection in Ely Cathedral with the LSO and were simply blown away by it - as the great Kenny Everett used to say, it sent a shiver down our spines, and Mahler became my favourite composer. When HvK recorded the 5th and the 6th, Richard Osborne found them as strikingly good as I did. Since then, of course, Mahler has come more into vogue and other, younger conductors with the benefit of modern recording techniques, have turned in equally good or possibly better recordings - but I still have my HvKs and treasure them. There's no denying Bernstein's charisma. But for me, HvK was the greatest, and always will be. The days of superstar conductors has long gone, and disappeared with the deaths of HvK, Bernstein and Solti. The nearest thing to a superstar conductor today would be, in my opinion, Valery Gergiev. Watching his performance of the Shostakovich Seventh with the National Youth Orchestra a couple of years back was an experience I shall never forget.

If HvK was still alive, he'd be 100 years old in April. His two principal record labels, Deutsche Grammophon and EMI, have a number of special reissues of his greatest recordings, and some publishers are either republishing or publishing new books on the great man. One of those books is Richard Osborne's monumental 800-odd page biography, which is reissued by Pimlico and is reviewed in this issue on the Non Fiction page. There are a number of articles on HvK too, some of them are press releases from the same two record labels, and there's my own tribute too. The links at the top of this page will get you to the HvK articles.

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