Word: karajan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Henryk Szeryng. The Polish-born master, dressed in shirt-sleeves, first listened dispassionately. When she had finished, he walked to his closet, donned a coat and tie and announced, "Now you can say hello to Uncle Henryk." Something similar happened when, at 13, she auditioned for Conductor Herbert von Karajan. After hearing her play a dazzling Bach Chaconne and some elegant Mozart, Karajan said, "We shall do a lot together." And they have, including many concerts and recordings of such staples as the Beethoven and Brahms concertos. "Playing with Karajan, there is an experience of sound you don't find...
...some 30 years, Salzburg's fortunes have been in the hands of the formidable Karajan, the dominant conductor of the postwar generation. Now 79, he is debilitated by a series of illnesses and must clutch a special railing as he makes his way to the podium. Those looking for clues to music's most hotly debated question -- Karajan's eventual successor at the Berlin Philharmonic -- find Salzburg an ideal place to begin speculation...
...couple of years ago, Karajan told an interviewer that he favored either the autumnal Italian conductor Carlo Maria Giulini, 73, former music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, or the vital young Soviet emigre Semyon Bychkov, 34, recently named conductor of the Orchestre de Paris beginning...
...chalk players, however, think the post will go to either. Far more likely is someone like Muti (whose festival poster had him clad in a black leather jacket, a la Karajan in his race-car days), or James Levine, who is cutting back his administrative duties at the Metropolitan Opera to expand his repertory. Certainly Levine's reputation has flourished in Salzburg in recent years. This season he is supervising an elegant The Marriage of Figaro, in substantially the same staging as Director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's New York and Paris versions, and a daring new production of Arnold Schoenberg...
More conventional was Don Giovanni. Karajan's 1986 recording with largely the same cast seemed sluggish and unfocused, but in the more stimulating environment of live performance, the interpretation gleamed. His is not the rhythmically incisive, sharply chiseled Mozart currently in favor in the wake of the original-instruments revolution, but a mellower, more reflective interpretation that prizes sonority and melodic beauty. Bass Samuel Ramey was a swaggering antihero, cocky till the end, and Soprano Julia Varady brought a sweet pathos to the obsessive Donna Elvira. Director Michael Hampe's staging was conventional until the climax. When the Commendatore dragged...