ABBADO REDISCOVERED

Previously-unreleased live recording from Vienna’s Große Saal, 31st May 1971: these tapes were recently discovered in the archives of Austrian Radio – the ‘ORF’. Abbado’s long association with the Wiener Philharmoniker began when he first conducted the orchestra at Herbert von Karajan’s invitation in 1965. The orchestra was so impressed by what the young music director from La Scala achieved that they immediately invited him to conduct one of their subscription concerts in the season after next in the city’s Musikverein. The programme included Schubert’s “Unfinished” and Fifth Symphonies. Austrian Radio recorded the concert on the morning of Whit Monday, 31 May 1971, but the recording lay untouched in the corporation’s archives until now. Now, nearly fifty years later, this recording allows us to rediscover the maestro as we would rediscover a Vermeer with every fresh viewing.

“The meaning of each individual note and of the pause and silence between the notes – it was this that Abbado, by his own admission, sought in Schubert’s music.” Wolfgang Stähr