Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 / Karajan, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

 (47 customer reviews)

By any measure this is one of the greatest Beethoven Ninths on disc. The quality of the interpretation hasn't been well stated in the reviews here, however.

Karajan in 1962 wanted to perform Beethoven in a modern way compared to the overtly spiritual, often very slow, heavy, and rubato-laden style of the past in Germany. This recording is a lyrical Ninth in many ways: the entire slow movement is lightly voiced and songful, and in the last movement Karajan takes the vocal line faster and with more smoothness, less effort than usual.

By comparison, Karajan wasn't as hectically fast or intense as Toscanini, not as straight-faced and diect as Weingartner, not as willful and overplayed as Stokowski, not as granitic and solemn as Klemperer. He was finding his own way, and being the master conductor of the age, his aproach is fascinating in every bar.

The overall impression is a natural arc moving from the mystery of the opening bars to the palpable joy and...Read more

This is Herbert von Karajan's THIRD of FIVE recordings of Beethoven's last and probably greatest symphony. It boasts the finest solo quartet on disc, the finest orchestral playing, but in the end, something is missing. This recording gets off to a great start with an electrically intense, gloriously played first movement. Karajan's ideal orchestral texture is at the service of emotion and interpretation, as it is in all his greatest recordings - and not the other way around, as it is in almost all of his recordings from the last twenty years of his life. The scherzo is similarly intense, at a fast tempo, and similarly well played, but the recording is a handicap: the all-important timpani lack presence and volume. But the third movement is probably the weakest part of this recording. The adagio gets it off to an excellent start with playing of hushed beauty from the Berlin Philharmonic. But as soon as we enter the andante moderato section, the spell is broken. This section is...Read more

There are an awful lot of Karajan-haters out there. What I have noticed is criticisms generally range from "he was too smooth with his sounds, especially in his later years" to "The performance left me cold, it was too perfect" to "He was a Nazi, you knew that, right?" Well, I find most of these criticisms either irrelevant or naive. For all I know, old HvK may well have been a Nazi, but it certainly does not affect my opinion of his conducting, just like such things don't stop people from buying Mercedes-Benzes or Volkswagens. As for the other criticisms concerning smoothness, unity of sound and perfect execution, I ask you this: would you rather get a flavor of the conductor, or that of the composer? With overly interpretive conductors, you typically get a result that has the conductor's fingerprints in every nook and cranny, thus tarnishing the original intentions of the composer. This is not to say that Karajan has never altered tempo for his own aims at sound, but I like that...Read more