Second Life

Essential for Karajan fans
I have probably watched every Karajan documentary that's been released on VHS and DVD over the last 25 years ("Karajan in Salzburg", "Karajan, or Beauty as I see it", "Karajan: Maestro for the Screen", etc.) This is one of the best, due almost entirely to the loads of rare footage I'd never seen before. The focus is on Karajan as a recording artist in the last 20 years of his career. So there are the requisite interviews with Anne-Sophie Mutter, Brigitte Fassbaender, and others. No terribly fresh or arresting points are made, but the rehearsal sequences and snippets from live performances and the footage of Karajan in the recording control room are truly invaluable. You get to see a side of him that is all too rarely displayed in the more glamorized and carefully staged stock footage. The snippets of him coaching Thomas Stewart as the Wanderer in Siegfried, or yukking it up in the control room with Michael Glotz and the sound engineers, or those from the live performance of...

Karajan the perfectionist behind the scenes
I have seen a number of documentaries on Karajan....but this one held my interest the most. It shows him fully engaged in an impossible quest to attain his artistic vision in the recording studio. He was a complex and demanding taskmaster, not especially sensitive in the area of interpersonal relations (Aspergers?), a deficit which he admits and ultimately a tragic figure despite his many achievements. The interview with Karajan filmed not long before his death comes as quite a shock, his aged drained appearance quite different than a few years earlier and his rather dismissive opinion of his recorded legacy with his Berlin orchestra not really something I expected. When I saw Karajan conduct Heldenleben on one of his last North American tours, he was barely able to make it to the podium where he sat as he conducted. On the final chord he expanded his arms straight out to the side and the Berlin Philharmonic produced a sound that I had never heard before in the concert hall. It...

Another portrait of The Great Conductor of the 20th Century
Excellent discussions about Karajan's recording habits by his producers and recording/sound engineers. Interview tibits complete the picture of this extraordinary musician and his recorded legacy.

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