Karajan and Weissenberg perform Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov

In the mid-1960s Herbert von Karajan began seeking out directors interested in filming music in new ways. These directors included the Swede Åke Falck (1925–1974), who had made a film in which the Bulgarian-born pianist Alexis Weissenberg (1929–2012) played Stravinsky’s Three Movements from Petrushka. The film had been brought to Karajan’s notice and, after a private viewing, Karajan expressed an interest in meeting the pianist. “No problem,” he was told. “He’s sitting right behind you.”

A child prodigy, Weissenberg had studied in Sofia under Bulgaria’s leading pianist and composer Pancho Vladigerov whose punishing First Piano Concerto the 18-year-old Karajan had played in Salzburg in 1926, damaging a tendon in the process. After Bulgaria’s annexation by the Axis Powers in 1941, Weissenberg and his mother fled to Palestine. Weissenberg quickly gained attention there and in the United States where in 1947 he won the Leventritt Prize. Important engagements followed but he quickly tired of touring. His performances of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with the Berliner Philharmoniker under Karajan, which took place in Berlin in 1967, marked his return to the international music scene.

Karajan generally reserved the Tchaikovsky concerto for special artists. He recorded it with Sviatoslav Richter and Lazar Berman and famously conducted it for the 17-year-old Evgeny Kissin in Berlin on New Year’s Eve 1988.

Where Falck’s filming of the Tchaikovsky is clearly experimental, the film of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto which Karajan himself directed in 1971 is more a musically informed concert hall report. Karajan loved Rachmaninov’s music and Weissenberg’s playing of it (Weissenberg’s RCA recording of the complete Préludes was one of Karajan’s favourite records). The Rachmaninov sound Karajan draws from the Berliner Philharmoniker recalls the sound on a famous series of recordings which Rachmaninov made with Leopold Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra in the 1930s, recordings which Karajan knew intimately.

Berliner Philharmoniker

Herbert von Karajan

Alexis Weissenberg