The Festival Hall was crowded on Friday for the visit of Herbert von Karajan, the most fashionable conductor of the present day, and indeed a symbol of the present day’s approach to the art of music. All over the world people in herds go to hear and to see him. He is undoubtedly a master of the orchestra, and he has some hypnotic power, though often he conducts with closed eyes: and also sometimes it is advisable for us to attend to him with closed eyes, now and again perhaps with closed ears.
Standing on a high square wooden platform, he swoops over the instrumentalists, apparently “playing” on each. His arms sweep along curves which are in themselves musical or rhythmic in motion: for a fortissimo he violently rises from a knee-bent sort of starting point, until his arms, stretched upward, threaten to shake the heavens. With tremendous thrusts from the right shoulder he emphasises an instrumental sforzando: with sensitive fingers and as if about to swoon he caresses a songful phrase. His physical agility is remarkable, spectacular, and fairly inexhaustible. No doubt it all keeps him fit for skiing.
He began quietly on the occasion under notice, playing the harpsichord in the B minor suite of Bach, back to the audience, shoulders very much in action during a dull performance, in which the flute player, Gareth Morris, entertained us with just about the only music, real music, we were to hear all the exciting evening.
The purely orchestral pieces chosen for our delectation, an odd pair in conjunction, not to say collision, were Strauss’s “Tod und Verklärung” and Schumann’s D minor Symphony. Karajan emphasised every banality of the “Transfiguration” section. The strings oozed out prayerful schmaltz: the brass were compelled to gigantic and resounding rhetoric. Karajan certainly knows how to spur even the Philharmonia to playing which rises above its own splendid average.
In this Technicolored performance, the hero in the first section of “Tod und Verklärung” died a hundred deaths. Nothing was left to our imagination. But this opening section was done supremely well. The pianissimo syncopations in the second violins and violas were finely controlled in tone and timing: the tense hush was a truly histrionic preparation for the pathetic “childhood” theme. Needless to say, the attack on the C minor allegro nearly knocked us out of our seats. I have been told that in Vienna Karajan conducts “Tristan and IsoIde” so sensitively that it sounds like chamber music. In this frenetic performance of “Tod und Verklärung,” we were given chamber of horrors music – and somehow, for all Karajan’s dynamic vulgarity, the effect in the end left at least one listener about as much impressed in imagination as by the chamber of horrors in a waxworks show. Karajan left not a phrase to sneak for itself. At times he appears to coax or bully the music in a sort of drastic act of orchestral accouchement.
He is something of an enigma. How could we relate this intense and masterful showman to the artist who has beautifully interpreted Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, and whose entirely musical “Die Meistersinger” counts among a lifetime’s memories? I should like to think that his exhibitionism and his doubtful taste at this concert were deliberate, and not part of his true self and method. His handling of the Schumann symphony was incredibly out of character with the work.
Schumann is here tender and dreamily gemutlich, or when full-chested and masculine, resonant in a noble way emulative of Beethoven. Karajan reinforced the score by extra wood-wind, brass, and eight double-basses, so that more than once it sounded like bad Brahms. The tempi were harried, drawn by the hair or, as with the lyrical theme of the finale, stroked out of all cantabile motion, accentuated to death. Such emphatic treatment, “ putting everything over,” drew attention from the symphony’s main interest, the long-viewed thematic connection, movement to movement.
As I say, Karajan is masterful: the score is at his mercy to a demi-semi quaver. He led the Philharmonia to heights of tonal splendour, even as he led youthful Strauss to deeps of tear-stained religiosity – until I ached to rush out of the Festival Hall to hear somewhere a half-dozen bars of clear-eyed, well-bred, and fastidious Stravinsky.
The audience looked so distinguished that it should have known better than to rave and roar as they did, as Karajan, in the coda of the symphony, rushed poor Schumann – what was left of him – out of all recognition and countenance.
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