One feels sometimes as though the presence of the great ones still lingers about the house, bumping into things and taking their place at the family dinner. Having grown up with the music and images of Herbert van Karajan in the mix, it is not too difficult to allow the imagination to see the diminutive Austrian assuming an avuncular place in the proceedings.
Perhaps an old DG disk would occasionally be put on the player just so the young ones remembered what Uncle Herbie could do with Beethoven on the podium and his Philharmoniker firmly under baton. One wouldn’t have found any strange, whacked-out surprises. Only sumptuous, precise Beethoven of the kind that bothered some of those nasty old music critics but became the Beethovian point of reference for the rest of us who didn’t know about such things.
This disk would be the perfect one. Two digitally remastered 1977 recordings put the ‘m’ in majestuoso. The memorable downbeat that kicks off the Second is, well, duly memorable here. Then it’s classic Uncle Herbie from start to finish, including his predictable but somehow paradigmatic of the Seventh’s Allegretto, One senses that von Karajan would not have tampered or injected too much of himself into thi movement for any reason, in the way that one does not trifle with sacred things.
Perhaps such a view credits lack of imagination with insightful reverence. But probably not.
Von Karajan could not only make his orchestra play large. He could also make them almost eerily precise. Hear how the dramatic downstrokes at the beginning end, each with almost clinical exactness. It’s schon.
This, my son, is what Uncle Herbie used to do with a Beethoven symphony.
Canter Bridge 
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