Word: karajans
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...What! As conductors go-and they do go: into their 70s, 80s, even 90s -Karajan at 68 is a comparative youngster. But following serious surgery for a slipped disc last year, his four-day concert of masterpieces seemed all the more remarkable. He takes no medicine and still experiences pain. In an infrequent interview, with TIME Music Critic William Bender, he dispatched the subject of pain fast: "So what! I had a long time to think during seven weeks in the hospital. Now everything is such a joy, the bread I eat, every step. It's a new life...
...arts it is always risky to equate states of mind with states of body, but Karajan's music did have a new intensity and purposefulness to it. Indeed, Karajan seemed at the peak of his interpretive power. As the slender, autocratic figure took the podium, one missed the old athletic spring. But not in the music. In fact, one could not detect any of the attenuated striving for effect, rather than meaning, that has marred many of Karajan's recordings in the past five years...
...Verdi Requiem was a marvel of controlled fervor. Soprano Mirella Freni's concluding Libera me had a rare blend of sweetness and power. The Brahms Requiem seemed cut from velvet rather than the usual broadcloth. Karajan's reading was a subdued rumination, a realization of the deeply personal utterance the composer drew from the Lutheran Bible. In the elegiac "And ye now therefore have sorrow," Soprano Leontyne Price seemed to distill grief and comfort into a burnished flow of melody...
...Tricks. For the Mozart Requiem, Karajan opted convincingly for a large symphonic approach, sweeping the music along with crisp rhythms and an ingenious succession of tempos. Bruckner's Te Deum has a peculiarly spare, even austere ring; Karajan caught that quality by the simple expedient of exposing all its modal harmonies and laying out its violent cross-rhythms firmly and precisely. Best of all perhaps was the Beethoven Ninth. This was one of those uncommon moments in which the strictest adherence to the letter of the score had a liberating effect. Rarely has the scherzo been taken at such...
...sort of mini-festival that Karajan could take pride in. In the currents of sound at Carnegie could be found not only a forceful musical personality but a remarkably complete one: a man's genius, his scholarship, his temper, his power to charm and the wide range of comparative musical judgments he has formed over a lifetime. He discounts the role of inspiration. "I don't believe in it," he says. "You have to work first. No decisions had to be made when we were pressed for time. After all, I wanted to enjoy...