The Brahms symphonies are for me amazingly self-renewing works, which I can listen to time and time again without any lessening of enthusiasm or interest. In the past I have reviewed single (or sometimes two) Karajan performances, but never a cycle, let alone two cycles. It's true that listening to performances for review purposes is a much more taxing process than listening for enjoyment or instruction, but at the end of these two cycles I felt a degree of fatigue which I had never before encountered. In examining and questioning my own response to Karajan's 1980s Brahms performances I have been somewhat reassured by RL's comment last February in his ''Quarterly Retrospect'', when he said that there were times when he felt that the new Fourth Symphony was on ''automatic pilot''. Though he was referring to just the one performance, it is a characteristic such as he describes which for me induces ennui in work after work, since expectation of a great symphonic experience is high, and is then only fulfilled through being helped out with a liberal supply of such imagination and energy as is possessed by your reviewer.
The only point in all these performances where Karajan is at all controversial in interpretation is in the Tragic Overture, where, as in the past, he chooses some odd tempos. Elsewhere, his interpretations are orthodox and exemplary. He has intellectual mastery over every symphony, even the difficult Third, which clearly presents him with no difficulties at all. But in almost every work the execution is muted. That Karajan can inspire a high degree of orchestral energy and attack is clear, for instance, at the beginning of the Tragic Overture or the third movement of the Fourth Symphony (in both performances). But he usually chooses not to do so, and even in the three cases I have just given the playing soon becomes afflicted with a poor sense of line, understated accents, and flaccid rhythms.
There are exceptions. In the late 1970s set the Third Symphony is given a quite virile, expressive reading, with impressive control and balance, and a good amount of energy. And the 1986 performance of the Second Symphony has a beautifully lyrical, golden quality, with rich, warm phrasing, and plenty of vigour in the last movement. Elsewhere, it is the case of cool, remote, enervating performances, which fail to bring the music to life adequately.
In neither set is the recording quality ideal. In the earlier cycle particularly, which was recorded as an entity in October 1977, the balance and perspective seems to change slightly within a performance, so that a constant, secure sound image fails to materialize. Nor is the quality itself very pleasing to the ear. The later set was recorded between 1983 and 1988, and there are variations in recording which range from the unpleasantly close, shrill sound of the Third Symphony to a Second Symphony which has an attractively warm, spacious acoustic.
Karajan's Brahms was at its best when he recorded the symphonies during the 1950s for EMI with the Philharmonic Orchestra. His first DG cycle with the BPO, made in 1963-4 (not currently available), also had more vitality than the two sets now on offer.'