Karajan's Seasons transfers to CD with digital remastering which makes its ebullience and robust rusticity all the more compelling. As in his Creation (DG), it is the orchestral playing and the season-by-season pacing which gives this performance its high profile. Instrumental detail may not be as pungent as those versions on period instruments, but the playing makes its own case boldly enough: the fast thaw and the slow freeze for instance, are created by superbly blended string playing, and Karajan insists on a new severity of bowing to recreate the silence of ''Winter'' in sound.
The balance between orchestra, chorus and soloists is exciting, too. There is a bright, sharply individuated core to the choral singing: this is one of the best bacchanales on disc, and, after the heady breath of autumnal Burgenland, Karajan predictably, but strikingly, drives into a swayingly weighty 'Heisa hopsa' of a dance. I find his Spinning chorus lisproportionately heavy, though: there might almost be a Dutchman lurking round the corner.
Gundula Janowitz, in both weight and timbre brings just the right degree of artlessness to Hanna's recitatives, and finds both warm south wind and cool shade within her voice. The men are less fun: Walter Berry is a less than sprightly Simon, happier leaning on his crook than whistling in the fields; and Werner Hollweg's Lukas though he sings in a wonderfully covered half voice for the summer dawn, can be insecure at the top of the register.'