Watch Herbert von Karajan and Berliner Philharmoniker - Tokyo 1957

This recording features Karajan and Berliner Philharmoniker's inaugural live concert of 1957 performed at NHK hall after their arrival in Tokyo. The fascinating images in black and white from Japanese television witness the enthusiastic success of the concert. Note: the first few seconds of the part featuring Beethoven's Symphonie Nr.5 are showing pictures slides.

(Karajan was to return in triumph to Japan for another tour two years later, this time conducting the Wiener Philharmoniker.)

From the mid-Fifties on, music was destined to have a fundamental role in the policy of showing the world the best face of German civilisation, one that, fortunately, no tragedy could cancel: the face of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, etc., and of the great, peerless symphony orchestras who historically were the privileged performers of the music of these composers, markedly the two greatest names: the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Wiener Philharmoniker. This is why both orchestras began to perform frequently beyond the confines of their own nations, thus becoming ambassadors of the new politics of their respective countries and of the civil, reassuring image of themselves that they wished to project.