The 2010-11 concert season has just started and, thanks to the internet, you can experience music-making live from many of the world’s great musical centres in the comfort of your own home or, at worst, in a cinema nearby. The new season schedule of the great Berlin Philharmonic is a thing of wonder, prompting serious thoughts of emigration. Woven through it is a cycle of the Mahler symphonies under Sir Simon Rattle, and if the Mahler First Symphony heard at the Proms was anything to go by, it should be quite a journey. Rattle is a hugely experienced Mahler conductor and his orchestra is sounding terrific at the moment. That First Symphony (caught live in the Philharmonie in Berlin the week before the Prom) will remain in the archive of the orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall so can be sampled whenever you fancy, and the Second (with Kate Royal and Magdalena Kožená) can he heard on October 30 in the Digital Concert Hall (and thereafter in its archive). Before that, you can catch Kožená reprising her Gramophone Award-winning performance in fragments from Martinů’s Julietta (conducted by Tomáš Netopil on October 2).

Other mouth-watering collaborations with the orchestra include a couple of today’s dazzling young conductors, Andris Nelsons (October 16 in Shostakovch’s Eighth Symphony and the Berg Violin Concerto with Baibe Skride) and Yannick Nézet-Séguin (October 23 in Messiaen’s Les offrandes oubliées, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto with Yefim Bronfman). A season ticket costs €149 and gives you access to 30 live concerts and unlimited viewing from the archive: that’s about £4.10 per concert (or less when you add the archive material); there are also 30-day tickets and one-offs. To access the Digital Concert Hall, simply log on to digitalconcerthall.com or, alternatively, you might find it easier using the excellent interface offered at bachtrack.com which is fast becoming a very useful hub for online concerts, both live and archived.

The Met continues its mission to take opera to the four corners of the globe, and this autumn’s programme has some treats in store, not least the first couple of instalments in its new Ring cycle to be conducted by James Levine and directed by Robert Lepage (and which includes Bryn Terfel among the cast as Wotan). Catch Das Rheingold on October 9. Other productions receiving HD relays this season are Boris Godunov with René Pape in the title-role and Valery Gergiev conducting (October 23), Don Pasquale with Anna Netrebko, Mariusz Kwieceń and John Del Carlo (November 13), a new Nicholas Hytner production of Don Carlo with Nézet-Séguin conducting and Roberto Alagna, Ferruccio Furlanetto, Marina Poplavskaya, Anna Smirnova and Simon Keenlyside (December 11). On the Met’s website (metoperafamily.org), follow the links to a comprehensive list of international cinemas where the screenings are taking place (though my “local”, the Barbican, sells out almost immediately).

A few years ago I went to my first concert at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles. The programme couldn’t have been better concocted to show off the extraordinary acoustics of the hall: Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question (so the first sounds actually came from outside the hall), John Adams’s Dharma at Big Sur (so some amplification from the electric violin) and Ravel’s complete Daphnis et Chloé ballet (Salonen conducted the LAPO): the whole thing was pretty special. But what I took away from the concert – and its programme-note – was the startling fact that the first LA performance of the Ives piece was given under the baton of none other than Herbert von Karajan. I’ve yet to find anyone, even with lavish hints, who has got it right when I’ve posed it as a question. And now the evidence has arrived from Pristine Classical (pristineclassical.com). “Karajan in Hollywood” conjures up all sorts of bizarre images but actually the concert is rather fine. After The Star-Spangled Banner, we get the Meistersinger Overture, the Ives (finely judged, though the quietness of the piece suffers a little from the slightly cramped radio sound – what a shame he never did it with the Berlin orchestra, it would surely have been quite something), Mozart’s Symphony No 35 (very exciting and the Presto finale taken at one hell of a lick) and Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (a work he’d conducted in New York the previous year and recorded with his Berlin Phil for DG that same year).

It’s no surprise that the playing of the LA Phil (even in the less-than-perfect acoustic – for recording – of the Hollywood Bowl) is first rate: here were some of the finest musicians in Hollywood who could turn their hand to any kind of music. And Strauss’s soaring lines and delicate melodic tracery are not exactly miles away from the typical Hollywood movie language of the day. Along with the three volumes of “Karajan in New York” recorded with the NYPO the previous year, this release makes a fascinating addition to the official Karajan story which is so focused on the Philharmonia and the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics.

Now, the year that Karajan was appearing in New York also saw another conductor with a fascination for sound make his debut with the Chicago Symphony – Leopold Stokowski. His two concerts from January 1958 have just appeared from Pristine and also add to the extraordinary picture of this amazing man. As is characteristic of him, his questing imagination took him to the music of Bach (Stokowski’s own orchestratration), Bolesław Szabelski (the Toccata), Shostakovich (the Prelude, Zoya, again orchestrated by Stokowski), Prokofiev (three pieces from Romeo and Juliet), Tchaikovsky (excerpt from Swan Lake), Brahms’s Second and Glière’s Third – a work Stokowski championed to terrific effect. If you are at all interested in the great musicians of the middle years of the last century, swing by Pristine from time to time: you’ll not be disappointed!

And finally, to coincide with Alfred Brendel’s Lifetime Achievement Award, I’ve selected a handful of recordings to support the claim that he is one of the great interpreters of the “core” Austro-German repertoire of the past half century. Enjoy!


The Essential Download Playlist No 36: Alfred Brendel

Beethoven Piano Concertos Nos 1-5 VPO / Rattle (Philips)

Beethoven Last Three Piano Sonatas (Philips)

Beethoven Cello Sonatas Adrian Brendel (Philips)

Brahms Piano Concerto No 2 BPO / Abbado (Philips)

Haydn Piano Sonatas (Philips)

Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor (Philips)

Mozart Piano Concerto No 9, K271 VPO / Mackerras (Philips)

Schubert Late Piano Sonatas (Philips)   

Schubert Trout Quintet Zehetmair; Zimmermann; Duven, Riegelbauer (Philips)

Schumann Liederkreis. Dichterliebe Fischer-Dieskau (Philips)

Available from Passionato, DG Webshop and iTunes

James Jolly