Opinion

Compared to many new and newly remastered box set releases on vinyl, the 17LP 'Original Source' package of Karajan’s Bruckner cycle on Deutsche Grammophon was a snip at under £300, which may be one reason why it has sold out. Sets can be found here and there online, of course, and the 'Original Source' project has now generated quite a back catalogue, with recent issues including Abbado’s first Mahler 2, and Pollini’s classic Chopin Polonaises.

A fellow Bruckner-phile recently alerted me to a fascinating discussion and behind-the-scenes documentary on YouTube, led by the LP mastering team at Emil Berliner Studios. Rainer Maillard is a name well known to many of us as a guru in ‘pure analogue’ recording and mastering. I treasure his ‘AA’ recording of Bruckner’s Seventh conducted by Bernard Haitink in his final appearance with the Berlin Philharmonic. In the documentary, along with the engaging Sidney Claire Meyer, he discusses the ‘original source’ of Karajan’s Bruckner , on 8-track tapes.

Tracked for the future

It came as news to me, at least, that DG recorded a good deal on 8-track with the potential for down-mixing to quadraphonic. The recordings were never released that way because too few consumers had the hardware to make it worthwhile. Quadraphonic playback was a hit-and-miss affair at the best of times, decades before 5.1 surround sound became commonplace. But DG continued miking and recording on 8-track tape (and down-mixing to quadraphonic as well as stereo) for some years in order to future proof, and their foresight has been rewarded by the efforts of Maillard and his colleagues.

While Karajan’s curiosity over technological innovation is established, the film explores the degree to which the sound of the Bruckner recordings is rather the work of the producer Günter Hermanns. To my eyes and ears, the manipulation of texture appears fairly crude, at least compared with Karajan’s work in balancing the Berlin Philharmonic musicians in the first place. Perhaps no wonder, I found myself thinking, that it is the live and off-air recordings of Karajan – such as the compilation of 1950s and ’60s concerts recently released on the BPO’s own label – which I often find more compelling than his work in the studio.

Meyer then details the use of artificial reverb, which in the case of the Bruckner cycle was achieved by installing another microphone near the top of the 220ft tower of Berlin’s Jesus-Christus Kirche – another reason, perhaps, why Karajan was cautious about switching to the Philharmonie, newly built to his specifications, as a recording venue. Even some of Abbado’s LSO recordings were enhanced this way. For the latest DG remastering, newly remixed from the 8-track tapes, Meyer has added a fresh gloss of reverb, as it were, using an echo chamber at the Emil Berliner studios.

Fifth time’s a change

The film gives a good deal of technical detail, and Maillard and Meyer engage in a longer YouTube discussion about the project with journalists Michael Fremer and Mark Ward. Somewhat glossed over is the number of edits in each recording, although Maillard posts a revealing tally. There are 24 edits in the first movement of the Fourth , 23 in i of the Fifth . Low numbers, which Maillard interprets as Karajan’s mastery of the studio process.

Fair enough: testimony from his producers of the time, such as Michel Glotz, supports the theory. But then i of the Sixth has only five edits! Karajan had never conducted the Sixth before – did he really have such a grasp of an 18-minute movement that it required only five edits? Or did he just not care that much? These are questions which no new remastering can answer, only your ears.