Recording info required on Karajan's Tosca

[Stanfordian]

Please can someone assist me concerning Karajan’s Tosca with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra with Katia Ricciarelli as Tosca and Jose Carreras as Cavaradossi. I want to know the location where in Berlin Karajan recorded the set in 1979?

[Chris Newman]

I cannot say for certain as I only have the (IMO much finer) VPO performance with Leontyne Price and do not have the booklet at hand. However until 1973 the BPO used the Jesus Christus Church in Dahlem for most of its recordings (Hvk, Furtwangler et al) and after that the Philharmonie. Dahlem was in the South West zone of Berlin.

It is sad that by this time HvK insisted on pushing young voices like Ricciarelli and Carreras beyond what they should have been doing and effectively shortened their careers by scraping the beauty off their voices. The cast of the earlier Tosca were well and truly up to verismo singing.

[Mahlerei]

IIRC Karajan was originally slated to record Tosca for EMI, who pulled out at the last minute. DG pounced and the rest, as they say, is history.

I'd be inclined to agree with Chris and say it was Jesus-Christus-Kirche, Dahlem, but I can't be sure. I also can't find any info elsewhere :(

[Karafan]

I will be happy to check tonight to see what I can find and will post then! My first impulse is to agree with the other posters and plump for the J-C-K in Dahlem.

K

[Thomas Roth]

Philharmonie.

[Karafan]

Mahlerei: you are quite right, EMI fled from the spiralling costs and DG leapt in. Günther Breest masterminded the coup and dubbed himself "hero of the hour". He was treated to a rehearsal in Karajan's drawing room at his house outside Vienna, with the maestro taking the part of Baron Scarpia!

Well, having checked the recording, the Osborne biography, Bachmann, Lang, Endler and John Hunt's discography, I am certainly none the wiser. DG were a little reprehensible in the late '70s and early '80s as to giving full recording dates and venues (not a patch on EMI or Decca in that regard).

I even checked his roughly contemporaneous recordings (Parsifal, Die Zauberflöte and Bruckner 6). The latter was definitely recorded in the Philharmonie in September of 1979, but the opera recordings have as woefully little annotation as the Tosca.

Of course, large scale opera works and orchestral recordings don't demand the same type of venue or acoustic, so one does not necessarily lend credence to the other. Karajan did conduct a concert performance of the opera in the Philharmonie with Ricciarelli, Carreras and Raimondi on 22nd February 1982.

Thomas: where is your information from, please?

++STOP PRESS++ Though the Gramophone review of July 1980 doesn't confirm the venue, the regurgitation in Sounds in Retrospect (September 1980) states it was recorded in the Philharmonie.

Bws

Karafan

[Thomas Roth]

My information is from Sounds in Retrospect and the first review in Gramophone of the release on CD. I also remember reading about the recording being made and about a very tired Carreras showing up at the Philharmonie.