KARAJAN CENTENARY
Topic: 2008 Anniversaries
Salzburg, which hosted Mozart's 250th birthday celebrations in 2006, will deck itself out for another musical extravaganza this year -- the 100th birthday of perhaps its next most famous musical son, conductor Herbert von Karajan.Ringing in the "Herbert von Karajan Jubilee Year" today will be a concert in Salzburg's famous "Grosses Festspielhaus" concert hall.On the programme, by the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg under its chief conductor Ivor Bolton, will be Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, Mozart's 23rd Piano Concerto and Richard Strauss's symphonic poem, Don Juan.That is exactly the same programme, with exactly the same orchestra, that Karajan made his professional conducting debut with on January 22, 1929.The Berlin Philharmonic, whose chief conductor he was from 1955 until his death in 1989, will play birthday concerts in Berlin, Paris and Tokyo.Vienna's legendary Musikverein concert hall is staging a three-part Karajan cycle of concerts, with both the Berlin and the Vienna Philharmonics. There will be a special Karajan Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland, and Salzburg's own Easter and Summer Festivals will also pay homage to the "maestro of all maestros".The birthday itself, April 5, will be marked by a special ceremony in Salzburg's Mozart House museum.The other orchestras Karajan worked closely with -- the Vienna Philharmonic, the Philharmonia Orchestra, and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra -- all have special memorial concerts lined up in New York, London and Munich.Record labels Deutsche Grammophon, EMI and Sony are unearthing and repackaging their countless and often legendary Karajan recordings and DVDs.There will also be a deluge of books about the conductor, including one by his widow, Eliette von Karajan, entitled "Mein Leben an seiner Seite" (My life at his side).And a new documentary by Robert Dornhelm is to be released on DVD.Born in Salzburg on April 5, 1908, Heribert Ritter von Karajan studied piano, harmony and composition at the Mozarteum in Salzburg between 1916 and 1926 and then conducting at Vienna's Academy for Music and the Performing Arts between 1926 and 1929.It was his music-loving father, a doctor, who gave the 20-year-old Karajan his first break, hiring the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg for his debut concert in January 1929.
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