KARAJAN Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 (1962) - PASC769

On 6 April 1962, London heard Herbert von Karajan conduct the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony and Bruckner’s Seventh at the Royal Festival Hall, in a concert broadcast by the BBC and remembered at once as an occasion of uncommon weight. More than sixty years later, what survives on this recording is not simply a performance of Bruckner’s Seventh, but the sound of a major musical encounter: Karajan, already one of Europe’s defining conductors, leading an orchestra whose authority in Austro-German repertoire seemed almost hereditary.

The atmosphere in the hall was vividly caught by Neville Cardus in The Guardian, who described “a packed raving audience” assembled for Karajan and the Viennese. Cardus, never one to miss the theatrical element in musical performance, saw Karajan as an imposing presence, apparently immovable before the massed players, able by force of personality alone to command total attention. Even that may have understated the sense of anticipation. The Vienna Philharmonic was not merely admired in London. It was heard as a carrier of tradition, a unique sound-world in itself.

That sound made an immediate impression. Writing in The Observer, Peter Heyworth called the orchestra “once more incomparable among the great orchestras of the world”, praising above all the individuality of its tone and manner of playing. He pointed to its capacity not “to glitter but to blend”, and to the sumptuous, rounded sonority that gave the performance its special character. Donald Mitchell in The Daily Telegraph responded in similar fashion, marvelling at the “warmth of the lower strings” and the thrilling vibrancy of the brass, while Richard Last in the Daily Herald wrote of the brass section’s “Day of Judgment sound”. Again and again, contemporary responses return to the same thing: not merely brilliance, but colour, weight, blend and grandeur.

If the first half of the concert drew more qualified admiration, the second seems to have carried the evening to another level. Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony was widely respected for its finish and beauty of line, but several critics found it too upholstered, too soft-grained, too little touched by classical tension or vitality. In Bruckner, however, conductor and orchestra appeared to meet on native ground. Here the long line, the breadth of phrasing and the patient accumulation of sonority all became virtues of the highest order.

Mitchell’s verdict was unequivocal: this was “a consistently brilliant and often noble performance”, and “London has not heard a Bruckner performance of this quality for years.” He singled out Karajan as “a master of the long phrase”, able to shape Bruckner’s huge spans with continuity and purpose, and described the great Adagio as “the crown of the interpretation”. Heyworth, too, was deeply impressed, writing that in the Seventh “the orchestra covered itself with glory”, and that “the splendour of its playing in the Bruckner was prodigious”. Most tellingly of all, he judged Karajan “a master not merely of sound but of architecture”, a phrase that goes to the heart of what this performance still communicates. For Bruckner’s Seventh depends not only upon sonority, however magnificent, but upon the shaping of great musical paragraphs, the balancing of immense spans and the controlled release of cumulative power.

Cardus, characteristically, heard both the splendour and a hint of artifice. He admired the way Karajan could make phrases seem to levitate, and called the Adagio “truly feierlich”, with its coda lamenting Wagner’s passing rendered with particular eloquence. Yet he also wondered whether the performance might be “a little self-consciously presented”, and detected in places a certain heaviness of tension and tempo. Heyworth likewise felt that the Scherzo lacked something in elemental force, and that the Trio was slightly sentimentalised. Such reservations are revealing, and valuable. They remind us that this was no neutral, objective traversal, but a distinctly profiled interpretation: grand, moulded, richly expressive, and unmistakably Karajan.

That, finally, is what gives this 1962 performance its documentary and musical fascination. Here is Karajan before a London audience, leading the Vienna Philharmonic in music central to its identity, and doing so with a command of line, texture and climax that contemporary critics recognised at once as exceptional. If there were qualms about polish, self-awareness or softness at the edges, they were voiced in the presence of something larger: a reading of Bruckner’s Seventh that struck London as a major event. The decades have not diminished that impression. If anything, they have allowed us to hear more clearly what those first listeners heard: noble breadth, sovereign orchestral playing, and Bruckner spoken in a voice of immense authority. ```