2008 is Herbert von Karajan’s 100th birthday (had he lived to this age, that is.) As a result there are a lot of recordings being reissued, given that this man is the most recorded artist in history (so far).
He has his critics — consider Norman Lebrecht, who is not above referring to him as a “Monster”. Some diss him on purely musical grounds (mostly finding fault with his insistence on a big, polished orchestral sound in all music, regardless of the stylistic period), and others on occasion for political ones (his near-complete control over musical Europe).
On the whole, though, I find most of those arguments unconvincing. There’s just no question but that Herbert von Karajan was a whale of a conductor and a superb musician. He was one of the conductors I grew up with (Ormandy, Bernstein, and Szell being the other important ones). I was in awe of his Brahms recordings, for example, and his Richard Strauss tone poems have always been to me the gold standard. It wasn’t until later that I discovered him as a Beethoven conductor, and I still consider him one of the very best.
There’s a lot more to him than just big-band smoosh. Consider his beautiful Debussy performances; there is no finer Pelleas than the version he did with Federica von Stade and Richard Stillwell, Berlin Philharmonic. Sibelius? His many different recordings of the various symphonies are all benchmarks in my opinion. Richard Strauss — none better.
He gave us one of the greatest Aidas ever — Tebaldi, Bergonzi, and von Karajan with the Vienna Philharmonic. Superb Otello, Falstaff. Fine Mozart operas, perhaps a bit uneven here and there but filled with light and grace.
In short, he just wasn’t the big heavy conductor he is made out to be sometimes. Even towards the end of his life, when spinal injuries made movement difficult for him, he was still able to lead the Berlin through an awesome Bruckner 7th.
I’m a von Karajan fan. There: I’ve said it. That may be unpopular in some circles, but I’m grateful to him for his many recordings. I don’t think that other conductors might have had more chances to make recordings without him; the record labels knew that he would sell, and thus he wound up recording material that would have otherwise gone unrecorded. Yes, he did four Beethoven cycles plus a fifth on video. Each one has something to offer, though. Between the 1953 cycle with the Philharmonia Orchestra on EMI, and the final 1984 digital cycle with Berlin, there’s a lifetime of change and experience. Certainly the 1984 cycle is the work of an older man, a more conservative one than the 1953, which is often white-hot. But there isn’t decay; there’s change, as there should be.
Currently I’m having a nice, slow time of it going through EMI’s complete set of Karajan recordings, in a whopping set of 160 CDs. And why not? No point in not exploring all of this repertoire with one of the master conductors.
And a lot of those 1940s/1950s recordings are splendid sonically as well as musically. Recording technology was damn good by the late 1940s.