GREAT RECORDINGS phase 14

SIBELIUS: FINLANDIA, EN SAGA, *VALSE TRISTE
TAPIOLA, THE SWAN OF TUONELA & *KARELIA SUITE
Berliner Philharmoniker/Herbert von Karajan

4 76846 2
(Angel: 4 76847 2)
Recorded 1976, 1980 & 1981
Stereo/ADD & *DDD
79 minutes

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‘Superlative performances and the excellence of the recording, extraordinarily vivid and realistic, cannot be too strongly emphasised.’ (Gramophone)

Award: Diapason d’Or, France

Karajan and Sibelius held each other in mutually high regard. During the 1940s and early 1950s, when Sibelius was execrated by critics and neglected by audiences, Karajan became one of his most respected interpreters and the elderly composer was duly appreciative: ‘Karajan is a great master,’ he wrote to EMI’s Walter Legge in May 1955. Sibelius’s daughter Eva later recalled that her father thought that, of conductors of the younger generation, Karajan had the greatest feeling for his music.

In his turn, Karajan seems to have had an instinctive understanding of Sibelius’s music: the mastery of time and space, the highly developed sense of form and the ear for sound worlds that are integral to the music rather than merely applied as so much skilful ‘orchestration’. Karajan’s advocacy of the composer certainly played a part in re-establishing Sibelius’s reputation, which by the time of the composer’s centenary in 1965 was as high as it had ever been. That year Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic played the fourth and fifth symphonies and Finlandia at the Helsinki Festival and the conductor visited Sibelius’s villa, where he met family members and laid a wreath on the composer’s grave.

From the early 1950s and for the next 30 years, Karajan recorded most of Sibelius’s orchestral music, some of the works several times. The EMI recordings reissued here were made in Berlin in the late 1970s and early 1980s and were acclaimed on their initial LP release. They feature the best known of the composer’s tone poems and incidental music and include Karajan’s only recordings of En Saga and the Karelia Suite.