The Berliner Philharmoniker's Digital Concert Hall — digitalconcerthall.com

In an earlier age, when popular light music was part of the classical mainstream, great conductors were as willing to lavish their art on the lighter end of the repertory as they were on loftier masterpieces. Not that the music was easy. “I conduct a lot of light music,” Herbert von Karajan remarked, “and it can be very difficult for an orchestra to realise it properly.” The Berliner Philharmoniker were used to the intensity which Karajan brought to the great works of the repertory but even they could be surprised by the care he lavished on performances of popular overtures, operatic intemezzi and other musical sweetmeats – musical “lollipops” as Sir Thomas Beecham used to call them. After making a record of operatic intermezzi with Karajan, a player reported: “If a bomb had gone off beside him, I doubt whether he would have noticed, so absorbed was he in the music.”

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