Making the case for Karajan


In a comment on my post about Stokowski the technology visionary, Antoine Leboyer observes that "Karajan also understood the importance of the medium as a message... these days, Karajan's and Stokowski's style have made them out of fashion but who has taken their place?" Who indeed? Herbert von Karajan was a technology enthusiast and his close friends included Sony executive Norio Ohga who was a key figure in the development of the Compact Disc. Like Stokowski, Karajan regarded technology as a servant that could help him achieve his artistic ideals. This attitude contrasts sharply with today's leading musicians who see new technology as a master that has to be obeyed without question. Who among today's celebrity maestros is playing an active role in freeing recorded sound from its straightjacket of compression?

Antoine's observation that Karajan's style has gone out of fashion applies far beyond technology. Today it is modish to dismiss Karajan because of his super-sized ego, his political affiliation and his opportunism. But was his self-promotion any worse than that of today's Rolex maestros? Was his self-serving political affiliation any more odious than those of Valery Gergiev and Gustavo Dudamel? And was his opportunism any more flagrant than that of the celebrity musicians and orchestras who flock to the ethically-challenged honeypots of the United Arab Emirates and China? But, above all, does the Beethoven and Brahms of contemporary icons such as Gergiev, Dudamel and their peers ever reach the exalted heights of Karajan's?

Discrimination in classical music comes in many nuanced forms. One is the division of great musicians into those who lived before the advent of the internet, and those who live in the internet age. As a result musicians from the pre-internet era such as Karajan and Stokowski who did not conform to the politically correct dictates of accessibility and who did not live their lives in the 24/7 glare of social media are now viewed as aliens from another planet. Music is a universal and timeless language that transcends ephemeral fashions. Like all of us, Herbert von Karajan, Leopold Stokowski had their faults. But they spoke the universal language of music with great eloquence, and today's musicians can learn much from them.

Image quite appropriately via Berliner Philharmoniker Digital Concert Hall. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Comments

AAL said…
Agree 100%. Karajan and Stokowski were giants, and those who criticize them do it out of jealousy, ignorance or both. Not to mention that, at least Karajan, was the opposite of arrogant - he was in fact a reserved and rather shy person, so totally devoted to his art and his family, that those who did not understand him perceived him as snobbish...
3:25 pm
Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

Does it have integrity and relevance?

Image
Shortly after it was released I bought the young Finn  Klaus Mäkelä's new complete cycle of Sibelius symphonies recorded for Decca. Sibelius symphonies are very well represented in my large CD collection , in fact I have more Sibelius symphony cycles than for any other composer. Yet I have returned to Mäkelä's interpretations a surprising number of times. No, they will not replace the accounts of Sanderling , Colin Davis,  Barbirolli , and others. But they are not worse or better: because subjective dualist judgements of better or worse, like or dislike, good and bad, definitive or otherwise, etc etc no longer mean anything to me . There is no concrete reality in a music performance, only what we individually perceive as reality. A performance is an endless flow of constantly changing conditions. The score is not the performance, and the performance is not the score. Between score and performance lie an infinite number of overlapping variables - tempi, dynamics, performanc
Read more

The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Image
Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol
Read more

Why new audiences are deaf to classical music

Image
One important reason why classical music is failing to attract a new young audience is being ignored - today's much sought-after digital natives are fast becoming tomorrow's hearing loss natives. As the Clínic de Barcelona explains , until recently, hearing loss had always been related to age: the older you are, the worse your hearing is. This situation, however, has changed in recent years, as increasingly younger people are suffering from hearing loss. There are many reasons for this widespread hearing loss. There are now high levels of ambient noise - for instance the average daytime ambient noise  without PA announcements inside a US airport terminal is 66 decibels which approaches that of a a washing machine. Then there is the noise from the headphones, earbuds, etc used for long periods with digital devices. In addition the overlooked widespread  use of ototoxic drugs , including macrolide drugs and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), contributes to hearin
Read more

The paradox of the Dalai Lama

Image
The Paradox of Our Age , a short but powerful essay credited to the present Dalai Lama, is widely available in Ladakh in northern India, a region known as 'Little Tibet'. The text ends with the observation that: 'These are times of fast foods but slow digestion/Tall men but short characters/Steep profits but shallow relationships/It’s a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room'. Tibetan Buddhism is widely viewed as an appealing alternative to materialistic Western society, so, not surprisingly, The Paradox of Our Age is widely circulated on the internet and Twitter - see photo tweet below . I bought The Paradox of Our Age on an exquisitely printed little scroll in the Tibetan refugee market in the regional capital of Leh, where I had travelled overland from Delhi in July to observe the Kalachakra teachings given by the Dalai Lama. My accompanying photos capture that intensely moving spiritual event; but they also capture a great spiritual tra
Read more

Classical music has many Buddhist tendencies

Image
With 376 million followers Buddhism is the fourth largest belief system in the world. Its core teachings of compassion and non-violence are well-known; but the wider cultural impact of those in the creative community exhibiting what the composer Jonathan Harvey described as "Buddhist tendencies" is underappreciated. Sri Lanka's state religion is Theravada - doctrine of the elders - Buddhism , and it may not be a coincidence that in 1960 elected Sirimavo Bandaranaike , the world's first woman prime minister. The island has been a center of Buddhist scholarship and practice since the introduction of Buddhism in the third century, and the country played a leading role in the preservation of the Pāli Canon of Buddhist teachings. I took the accompanying photos on a recent pilgrimage to Buddhist shrines in Sri Lanka, and to illustrate the influence of Buddhism on classical music I have juxtaposed them with cameos of music with Buddhist tendencies that provided the iPod so
Read more

Master musician who experienced the pain of genius

Image
On that sleeve for his 1985 recording of the Goldberg Variations , Scott Ross is seen standing in the grounds of Château d'Assas in Languedoc. It was here that many of the harpsichordist's great recordings were made. Then, as today, the château dwelt in the twilight zone between grandeur and dereliction, and thirty years ago the recording sessions were regularly interrupted by the sound of rats scurrying across the floor. Scott Ross was born in Pittsburgh in 1951, and moved to France with his mother following the death of his father in 1964. He studied at the conservatoires in Nice and Paris, and first came to Château d'Assas in 1969 to give music lessons to the grandson of its owner Mme. Simone Demangel . When an early music academy was established at the Château d'Assas, Scott Ross gave masterclasses and became a frequent visitor. At first he stayed in a room in one of the towers, but from 1983 he rented a small house across the road from the château. The photos b
Read more

Vonnegut gets his Dresden facts wrong

Image
In 1968, the year I wrote Slaughterhouse Five, I finally became grown up enough to write about the bombing of Dresden. It was the largest massacre in European history. I, of course, know about Auschwitz, but a massacre is something that happens suddenly, the killing of a whole lot of people in a very short time. In Dresden, on February 13, 1945, about 135,000 people were killed by British firebombing in one night. It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little PoW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it. Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 novel Slaughter-house Five is an essential part of the literature of the bombing of Dresden. In his new book A Man Without a Country: A
Read more

Music as a wave of probability

Image
Within yourself, music plays without pause, Vibrating strings are not the cause. This music comes from the Word, says Kabir; It pervades subtly for all to hear. This sound divine makes the seeker free, Then in maya's  clasp he shall no more be. That poem is a free rendering by the Himalayan Yogi Swami Rama of verse by the great Indian poet Kabir. The painting above portrays Kabir; it is by the contemporary Indian artist Arpana Caur ; as are all the other graphics. If my overgrown paths are noted for anything it is for their abstruseness , and this long read takes that dubious distinctiveness to a new level, as it links a medieval mystic to an example of misunderstood 20th century Western classical music, and on through quantum physics to propose that there is no such thing as a music masterpiece Little is known about Kabir's life: both the place and date of his birth are unverified, but it is generally thought he was born in AD 1398 in Varanasi. Kabir's poetry
Read more

Classical music must break through the electronic glass ceiling

Image
Why does classical music have such entrenched antagonism towards electronic sounds when one of its most successful recent compositions is closer to ambient electronica than a Beethoven symphony? Now don't get me wrong. For me John Luther Adams' Become Ocean is a masterwork which thoroughly deserved the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the 2015 Grammy for Best Classical Contemporary Composition. But after listening to it many times I have come to the conclusion that John Luther Adams' orchestral tour de force is, in fact, electronica by another name. And what's wrong with that? In his ecstatic review of Become Ocean Alex Ross describes Become Ocean as possibly "the loveliest apocalypse in musical history". But there is also a strong case for arguing that this apocalypse could be created with similarly magical impact by electronics instead of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, if only deeply reactionary factions within the classical establishment would allo
Read more

Colin McPhee - East collides with West

Image
'It seems to me certain that future progress in creative music for composers of the Western world must inevitably go towards the exploration and integration of elements drawn from more than one of the world's cultures. ' This remarkably accurate prophecy was made by Henry Cowell in 1947, and was prompted by a radio broadcast of Colin McPhee's gamelan inspired Tabuh-Tabuhan which had received its first performance eleven years earlier. Carol J. Oja's exemplary biography (jacket below) describes Colin McPhee as a 'composer of two worlds'. He was born in Toronto in 1900, and established a dual career of pianist and composer at an early age. He started his studies at the Peabody Conservatory in 1918, and spent two years studying in Paris before settling in New York in 1926. He quickly established himself as a one of a new generation of American composers, and his music was presented at a concert of Edgard Varèse's International Composer's Guild. At
Read more