Digital Mastery: Celebrating Herbert von Karajan’s Legacy with New Deutsche Grammophon Releases

“Karajan’s story is the story of that ‘classical record industry’.”
Gramophone January 2023

 

Just four weeks ago, we highlighted the remastered Bruckner cycle on LP being published in August. Last week, we introduced the “Karajan Digital Library,” showcasing Karajan’s complete recordings on DG and Decca across 25 digital albums with cleaned metadata for a better readability and searchability and a more precise description of the tracks.

The albums are arranged in alphabetical order of the composers, so they start with – no, not with Bach but with the end of the list – “Wagner – Wolf-Ferrari”. The big Bs’ turn is in September, when the publication will reach its finale “Adam – Bartók”.

The W album features Wagner’s “Parsifal” and the complete “Ring”, the recordings of orchestral music and the legendary Salzburg encounter with Jessye Norman, music by Weber and Webern (not quite the same) plus an intermezzo by Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari. The albums are only available digitally, not as CDs.

The V album, released today, contains Verdi and Vivaldi – complete recordings of Verdi’s “Aida”, “Un ballo in maschera”, “Don Carlo”, “Falstaff”, “Otello”, “Il Trovatore” and the Requiem, collected overtures and intermezzi, and 15 concertos by Vivaldi – including the famous “Le quattro stagioni”.

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—  P.R. Jenkins