BRAHMS: Symphony No. 1 / BEETHOVEN: Leonore Overture No. 3 / STRAUSS: Salome: Dance of the Seven Veils

Karajan, Herbert von, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

8.111298

We tend to forget that Herbert von Karajan had already enjoyed a major recording career before making those famous discs with the Philharmonia in the early 1950s.

Accused of being a member of and colluding with the Nazi Party, a charge never fully answered, Karajan’s career had been placed on hold when he was brought to London to work with the newly created Philharmonia. The superb series of releases that followed rehabilitated Karajan’s international standing, and eventually took to the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic. During the war he had worked with both the Philharmonic and Staatskapelle, and was a guest of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam where he made these discs for Polydor in September 1943.
Though the record sleeve describes the Brahms performance as ‘exciting’, in reality it is slow and burdened down with Germanic lassitude, the pedantic opening statement setting the scene. It does come to life in the finale, and throughout Karajan obtained excellent playing from the orchestra. Those slow tempos spill over into Beethoven’s third Leonora Overture, and even at this stage he had cultivated that strategy of taking passages very slowly so as to heighten the effect of speed that follows. Here he much oversteps the mark before the final section.
To complete the disc he directs Richard Strauss’s Dance of the Seven Veils from the opera Salome, and we encounter the master of theatricality. The playing is as seductive and erotic as you could wish, the woodwind absolutely superb. The enclosed booklet describes the sound as ‘relatively primitive’, but it is somewhat better than that, and the transfers have been very well achieved. • David's Review Corner, November 2008

CD x 1

Naxos

18.07.17

747313329823