A new home for Karajan on Apple Music

We’re pleased to bring the Karajan Institute’s playlists and the stories behind the recordings to listeners on Apple Music Classical and Apple Music.

Our new curator page is a dedicated space for selections made by the Institute’s team. Alongside the music, we share background on the performances, the musicians involved and the occasions that brought them together.

For readers who have followed our articles and explored the accompanying Spotify playlists, this offers another way to listen. Through our Apple Music selections, we’ll revisit Karajan’s artistic partnerships, explore his repertoire and introduce recordings from different stages of his career.

 

We begin with the festival summer

Our first playlist, “Karajan and the Festival Summer”, looks back at Salzburg, Bayreuth and Lucerne—the three festivals we explored in our recent articles.

Each held a different place in Karajan’s life. Salzburg was his hometown, and his association with its festival lasted more than fifty years. Bayreuth occupied just two summers, but placed him at the heart of the festival’s post-war reopening. Lucerne became an almost annual summer appointment over four decades.

The playlist follows this journey, pairing historic live performances with selected studio recordings of festival repertoire. Highlights include the Presentation of the Rose from the Rosenkavalier, which inaugurated Salzburg’s Grosses Festspielhaus in 1960; Wagner performances from Bayreuth in 1951 and 1952; and Dinu Lipatti’s last concert with orchestra in Lucerne. Jessye Norman’s 1987 performance of Isolde’s Liebestod returns us to Salzburg for the final track.

An extended description accompanies the selection, connecting the recordings with the stories from our articles. We’ll revisit the playlist each year, adding more music from Karajan’s festival summers.

 

More to come

On 25 September, “Karajan and the Greatest Voices” will turn to the singers who worked with him. “Karajan and the Russian Classics” follows on 9 October.

Whether you know these recordings well or are hearing them for the first time, we hope you’ll join us.

Explore the Karajan Institute’s curator page on Apple Music.