Back on the 7.37 am train this morning and back to the old iPod. I am beginning to wonder how I survived the commute without this wonderful little gadget in my handbag. While it is quiet and I read my paper all is well, but as soon as we get to Chelmsford and the train fills up and the mobile phone inane conversazione begins, it turns into my lifesaver as I use it to block everything out. According to a survey carried out some time ago, the music best suited to listen to while on a train or plane is Mozart or Beethoven. Now I would very much like to know just what percentage of travellers actually do tune into Wolfgang or Ludwig. Not many on my line I feel. Most Colchester-London commuters with the ear phones in seem to have a permanently dazed expression on their faces while jogging up and down, banging their knees in time to the music or thumping the floor with their feet. The rhythms they are displaying certainly do not sound like the aforementioned composers. As I can usually hear the tinny drum beat as well it is odds on that they are listening to something completely different.
So this morning when the usual irritants started, in I plugged and decided that Ludwig was my choice for the Monday morning trek. I decided to listen to his Fifth Symphony. When building up my post divorce record collection again (I was not allowed to take a single CD away with me.......a sore point still) I was fairly indiscriminate in my choice of CD, finance tended to point me towards the cheaper end of the market and I ended up with a pretty eclectic bunch of orchestras and conductors performing the symphonies and piano concertos etc. I ended up with a performance of the Fifth and Seventh by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Carlos Kleiber (I have managed to avoid the ubiquitous Herbert von Karajan even though he recorded each cycle about five times and was in charge of Berlin Phil for yonks) which is simply stunning. Each time I listened to it I was totally overwhelmed by the way it was driven forward, the momentum achieved and the incredible brass sound which just makes your hair stand on end.
A few months ago Radio 3 was doing the Fifth in its CD collection and recommendation so I decided to listen out of curiosity as I certainly had no intention of purchasing a new one, and lo and behold, it turned out that this was the recording that stood head and shoulders over every other one (well, according to the Beeb anyway), and apparently had also been recommended ten years ago when they had reviewed the then current recordings. So I had stumbled by accident on the best one on the market and I am not going to argue with Radio 3 about that. Oddly enough, the recommendation ten years ago was by one Richard Osborne who used to reduce me to hysterics with his poncy reviews. He used to write for the 
Gramophone as well and totally adored Herbert von Karajan and became positively oleaginous in his praise for him and the Berlin Phil. I well remember his writing about the 'grieving strings of the Berlin Philharmonic' and the 'luminosity of his conducting'.
He produced a biography of Karajan which was quite stomach churning in its I-am-not-fit-to-breath-the-same-air-as-this-genius manner and it is quite interesting to read a review of this book and his chats with the Great Man and note what is said in a review I just checked out:
''Conversations With von Karajan'' is a thin and disappointing volume. In a way it's a double portrait, of the subject as hero and the questioner as hero-worshiper. Just over half the book's pages are devoted to the interviews; the rest go to photographs of varying interest, to footnotes and to Mr. Osborne's tendentious preface and introductory profile. The footnotes are detailed, but sometimes irrelevant (there's one about how Simon Rattle and Karajan never met) and sometimes wrong (at one point Karajan talks about one film version of Mozart's ''Don Giovanni'' and Mr. Osborne in the footnote talks about another). It is amusing to read Mr. Osborne's attempt to depict the unpretentiousness of Karajan's Salzburg household, despite the presence in the garden of ''three llamas and a charming old donkey that once appeared in Carmen.''
and
"He is an obsequious conversationalist, addressing Karajan in a tone the conductor apparently accepted as only his due (''you are the first conductor in history to use film as an integral extension of your work as an interpretive artist'').
When one takes agin somebody, you look back and think 'well was he really that bad, perhaps I over-reacted' and then I read these reviews and remember just how dreadful he was. I also remember reading a letter from a Gramophone reader saying 'how grateful and humble he felt that Richard Osborne was put on this earth to educate us in the fine art of Karajan'.
This really is a rambling post which has just gone on from the Beethoven Fifth and may be of interest to nobody but I have enjoyed writing it. It is the centenary of Karajan's birth this year and the shops are once more full of recordings, CDs, book and DVD's of The Great Man. I have quite a few of his recordings and under his baton there is no doubt that Karajan was a great conductor. Trouble was his personality and ego just got in the way of the music and after a while this became a severe irritant. I have recently read an article by Norman Lebrecht which makes my strictures seem somewhat mild so that makes me feel better!
And as a footnote, my other Beethoven symphony recordings are mainly Klemperer, Muti, Solti and Colin Davis so I have a pretty good mix there. If it is noisy tonight I shall listen to more Beethoven, and going home commute usually is with endless reports home to various partners of where the traveller is currently located. 'I'm at Chelmsford'. Ten minutes later 'Oh I have just reached Witham' and so on and on and one until we arrive at Colchester. 'I'm in Colchester are you in the car park? Oh I am just getting off the train now, can you see me"
I kid you not...
