This is a famous and famously successful recording of the Ninth, keenly felt and finely honed after the manner of Toscanini. Yet, as the years advance, I become more and more a Furtwangler man where the Ninth is concerned. Nor, in my view, is this 1962 Karajan as great an all-round success as his very first recorded Ninth (Columbia, 10/48—nla) or his exceptionally fine 1976 version (also at mid price).
As William Mann remarked in 1962, it was an odd decision to take the Vienna Singverein (not necessarily the finest choir in the world) all the way to Berlin only to leave them at the railway station. An exaggeration, of course: but the choir is distant in the finale and there is not a great deal that can be done about it now. Even the Original-Image Bit-Processing seems at a loss. Elsewhere, the sound—always a touch hissy on CD—now has marginally more presence than in an earlier CD transfer.
The real gem of the 1961-2 Karajan cycle was the Fourth Symphony (only available as part of a five-disc set), a miraculously poetic and fleet-footed reading that was sui generis. Karajan never played it like that again on record, making it a genuine candidate for a place in a series called The Originals.
Nowadays this 1962 Ninth is rather surplus to requirements. Nor is it helped by its preface here: a rather brassy and reverberant account of the overture Coriolan, a work in which Karajan rarely achieved the sense of compelling tragic pathos we have from conductors like Furtwangler and Giulini. R1 '9505009'