Debussy: La Mer, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune — Ravel: Pavane, Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2

Karajan’s Score-Free Philosophy

Someone once asked Herbert von Karajan why he never looked at the score while conducting. His answer: “The score is in my head, the music is in my heart.”

Debussy and Ravel occupied two of the softest corners of his heart. This album — La Mer, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2, and Pavane — was recorded in December 1985 in the Berlin Philharmonie. You can picture Karajan with eyes shut, letting that sea rise and fall before him.

The Dawn, and All Its Gradations

The Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2 opens with “Lever du jour”: light from flute and harp climbs out of stillness, then the full orchestra like a sun finally pushing over the ridge. Karajan lets the Berlin strings become the underpainting — dense, even, able to carry every layer of colour.

Some say Karajan’s Ravel is too “beautiful,” too smooth. But “Lever du jour” is meant to be a perfect sunrise — and who would complain that a sunrise is too beautiful?

The Other Side of the Sea Is Debussy

The Debussy on the album’s second half is a different light. In La Mer, Karajan doesn’t describe waves; he describes the memory of the sea: every motif a flash of recollection, suspended softly in mid-air by the strings and brass.

The BPO’s Taiwan Bond Belongs to a Later Era

In Karajan’s day the Berliner Philharmoniker never came to Taiwan. Their Taiwan memory was opened by Rattle: November 2005, the first visit, some thirty thousand people packed the plaza outside the National Theater. Twenty years later, in November 2025, Petrenko led the orchestra back to Taipei to celebrate the anniversary.

Karajan never heard Taipei’s applause. But this recording means the sea that once lived in his mind can flood the room of any island, anytime.

Further Listening

If you love the polished sonority of Karajan and the BPO, Petrenko’s 2025 Schoenberg album shows a different temperament of the same pairing in the twenty-first century. And Abbado’s 1987 Beethoven Fifth with the same orchestra shows how the BPO, after Karajan, hammered out a different “fate” altogether.