A few months before Urlicht AudioVisual recorded Miranda Cuckson’s Világ in August 2022, Sascha von Oertzen (the engineer on Világ) got a hold of me to see if I might be interested in taking on a project. We got together for lunch soon thereafter, and she revealed the details.
My jaw just about hit the floor when she told me what it was.
Some years earlier, the Berlin Philharmonic had established its own in-house record label, and set a new standard for quality in both sound and packaging. Most of the focus was and remains on modern recordings of the digital era, including several conducted by their current music director, Kiril Petrenko – their recent release of Shostakovich Symphonies Nos. 8, 9, and 10 is simply sensational.
But the one release that absolutely floored me was the complete surviving radio recordings through 1944 conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler – a 22-SACD set issued in 2019. Yes, about half of the recordings in the set had been issued over two decades ago by Deutsche Grammophon after the tapes had been recovered from a Russian broadcast archive – but the Berlin Philharmonic’s own release, under the supervision of Christoph Franke, yielded a consistent and vast improvement in sound quality over any previous releases.
Sascha told me that the label was beginning work on a second large historical box. It would chronicle live performances of the orchestra from the 1950s and ’60s conducted by Herbert von Karajan. Christoph had already enlisted Emile Berliner Studios to transfer the tapes. Sascha was coordinating with Christof, supervising a portion of the remastering process and doing additional remastering on several of the recordings herself.
She asked if Urlicht AudioVisual might be interested in helping out with preparing some of the recordings for release.
(… knowing full well that there was practically no way I would say no to a project this interesting!)
And so, over the next two years, we worked together on the project. Sascha sent me raw high definition digital transfers. I fired up my many digital toolkits, and worked to improve the overall sound quality as well as remove all manner of glitches large and small – not to mention some of the most sonorous coughs I’ve ever heard (and you’ll never hear).
There was an especially interesting takeaway from this project: if you think you “know” Karajan from his studio recordings, you will be astonished by some radical interpretive differences. Karajan’s approach in front of an audience is noticeably different than that before the microphones. Compare the plush, rich sound of his Dvořák “New World Symphony” on UK Columbia/EMI with the propulsive outer movements and scherzo – and emphatically rhetorical second movement – from the concert performance from 23 September 1965. The interpretation is a far cry from Talich or Kubelík, and is completely convincing.
The same held true of the other recordings I processed: Bruckner’s Fourth and Eighth Symphonies, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5, an enormously satisfying all-Richard Strauss program (the Oboe Concerto with the orchestra’s principal oboist Lothar Koch, Vier letzte Lieder sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and Ein Heldenleben), and Mozart’s Divertimento No. 15. The same composer’s Concerto for 3 Pianos (with Karajan, Jörg Demus and Christoph Eschenbach at the keyboards) and Richard Rodney Bennett’s Aubade are among items new to the official Karajan discography.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that many of the other recordings were remastered by another member of the team Sascha assembled, Jennifer Nulsen, whose portfolio as an audio engineer is most impressive.
You can read reviews of Berliner Philharmoniker / Herbert von Karajan: Live in Berlin 1953–1969 in The Guardian and a detailed two-parter at MusicWeb (here and here).
The set is now available from several vendors, including the Berlin Philharmonic (where you can find a complete list of contents), Presto in the UK, and JPC in Germany.