Herbert von Karajan was one of the first conductors to record Brahms' "A German Requiem" complete, in 1947 for English Columbia - now EMI. Over the next four decades he repeated the feat three times, once more for EMI and twice for Deutsche Grammophon.
To those may be added a 1990 DG video, recorded at the 1978 Salzburg Easter Festival, and the above-listed Sony laserdisc, also taped live in 1985 in Vienna's Grosser Musikvereinsaal. Like their audio-only predecessors, each stands as a compelling account of this masterwork, preserving what may have been the late Austrian conductor's finest single Brahms interpretation.Just the same, something happened to Karajan's Brahms Requiem over the years. Without giving up much in the way of strength or refinement, it took on an added spirituality that makes his 1986 DG CD, for me, one of the most moving realizations of this music on record.
The two laser videos fall somewhere in between. The Salzburg performance retains more of the old discipline and power, especially in the more intense pages of "Denn alles Fleisch" ("Behold all flesh") and "Denn wir haben," with its climactic fugue.
At the same time, though, there is a subliminal intensity about the Vienna performance, especially in the rapt ethereality of the outer sections, with their comforting repetitions of the word "Selig" ("Blessed"), that the Salzburg performance does not always match. What's more, it also has Kathleen Battle, whose radiant soprano proves more affecting than not only all her video counterparts but most of the audio ones as well.
It is also more atmospherically taped, capturing the gilded richness of the Musikvereinsaal more effectively than what the 1978 team accomplished in the Salzburg Festspielhaus. Both, however, tend toward the rank-and-file closeups that give many of Karajan's later videos a claustrophobic quality - and that despite the more expansive distribution of the chorus on the Salzburg stage.
So which to choose? Unless the soprano is of paramount importance, I would opt for the earlier reading, with its subdued warmth and controlled power. (It also finds van Dam in slightly fresher voice.) Though reading may not be the right word for a pair of performances in each of which the chorus sings from memory.
If the visuals are paramount, though, I must call attention to RCA's 1993 disc with Colin Davis and the Bavarian Radio Symphony and Chorus. Taped in a magnificent baroque church, it not only catches that building's high-ceilinged splendor more imaginatively than either of the two Karajan videos - it also offers the sharpest picture of the three.
Not so the performance, with few exceptions the softest and slowest of the lot, though I do like the flow Davis brings to "Wie lieblich" ("How lovely is thy dwelling place") and the drama he and baritone Bryn Terfel find in "Denn wir haben." (It also offers the lowest-level sound.)
By contrast the music is always in the picture in the Karajan performances (though on each the analog tracks pack less punch than the digital). And in what remains its composer's largest-scale yet still intimately human work, that is the image that counts.