Search - Bela Bartok, Herbert von Karajan, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra :: Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra; Music for Strings

Karajan's Bartok--pinpoint accuracy and no rough edges

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 05/21/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Karajan took a narrow view of Bartok's output, giving us only two works, the Concerto for Orchestra and the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, but he was devoted enough to record each three times (once with the Philharmonia in the Fifties, twice with the Berlin Phil. in the Sixties and after.) There is also a concert broadxast of the Third Piano Concerto with Geza Anda from Salzburg.



Critics were not generally pleased with Karajan's ultra-controlled, somewhat bloodless way with Bartok, which seemed far removed from folkloric Hungary--the Gramophone spoke of "Berlin cream sauce" being poured over the music. Certainly there are no rough edges anywhere in these readings, which EMI has remastered in vivid sound, with strikingly wide stereo separation in the MFSP&C in keeping with the composer's precise direcitons about how the musicians are to be placed onstage.



Anyone who wants tangy, angular Bartok won't be happy, but as compensation we get really astonishing virtuosity from the Berliners; the strings' ability to handle Bartok's presto passagework in the finale of the Concerto and the second movement of the MFSP&C is unequalled in my experience. Most listeners will fall back on the familiar recommendaiton of Reiner or Solti in this music, but Karajan provides thrills and a perspective all his own."