Is this Netrebko’s first recording in German?

Chris says:

Thank you for the detailed response. Last things first: You can not record the moment of live. What makes a live performance thrilling is that you know that are there in that very moment. When its recorded and you listen to it later its not the same thing anymore. Its just a recording. And most often a mediocre one, because there are so many flaws and compromises and insecurities in a live performance. Flaws which don’t matter much in the moment of a concert, because the flow of time is immediate and the flaws are not repeatable. Recorded flaws are repeatable. So the “magic” of live recordings simply does not exist, not to the degree it’s claimed anyway. It’s a myth mostly, and one that helps the business selling cheaply produced recordings, no less.

Having said that, what can make them special is the perceptual bias of the listener, believing to witness a live event. It’s a simple experiment, and it has been done with the expected result. You can play studio recordings to a blind audience and label them as live recordings, and the majority will tell you that these recordings are more exciting than studio recordings because they believe them to be live. It’s all in the perception, not in the quality of the recording.

Also musicians are often wrong about this and perceptually very (!) biased as well. They are under a certain focus and in a state of “flow” when performing for a sizable audience, and they don’t have that feeling when in the studio, which feels more like a rehearsal for them. So they simply believe that the live performance is more “musical”. But that belief falls apart when they listen to that recording without perceptual bias (e.g. not knowing that it is their own live recording). You can’t record the “magic” of live, because it exists only in the mind, not in the material world. On top many musicians don’t like studio recordings much, simply because they prefer performing for, and immediately being rewarded by, an audience.

Now to the audible edits in Karajan’s recordings: True, I have several recordings with them. If you watch the documentaries about Karajan, you can see how he did force his recording team to do things that were against their professional ethics. I could very well imagine that he also demanded edits, which in the age of analog tape were not doable, but he insisted nevertheless. So that’s what we got. He was not grand enough to let other professionals do what they do best and stick to his realm. He was a control and power freak.

Now to your first paragraph. It’s not a good idea to compare live recordings from a different epoché (Furtwängler 40s) with later studio recordings. Because the earlier recordings might be just testament to a different style of music making we like, and you would need to compare to the studio recordings of the same performers from roughly the same time to get a meaningful result from your comparison. Celibidache on EMI is mostly meh…. nothing compared to the music you experienced in the hall being there. He, with his way of transcendending time in a live performance, is the exemplary showcase how live can not be recorded. Almost nothing of his magic is in the recordings. Also the balance in those recordings is often far from being ideal. Which is not surprising, considering they were mostly only documentary recordings for the orchestras archive with modest technical means, never meant to be published, since Celi was so vehemently against doing recordings. As far as Rattle in Berlin is concerned, I find these mostly (e.g. Brahms, Schumann) not very interesting either, but that’s not a problem of live or not live, but mostly one of the interpretation I believe.

Again, your words:
“the dramatic tension of a live recording is hard (though admittedly not impossible) to achieve in the studio.”
are based on a perceptual bias, not on reality. There is no dramatic tension in a live recording, at least most of the time. That tension, it might be felt by everybody in the hall, on stage and in the audience, sure, but it never makes it into the recording. Because it is not in the material realm. That tension is the spiritual interaction between people being together with a common mission, at a certain moment in a present time. It can not be recorded, unfortunately.