Claudio Abbado would have been 90 today. Funny, I still think of his appointment as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic as being fairly recent. Seeing this video – obviously from video tape – makes me realize just how long ago it was! 1989! He certainly had some big shoes to fill, in the wake of Karajan. I don’t know that I ever entirely bought in to the marriage, though the first time Abbado conducted the orchestra was all the way back in 1966.

For me, and I imagine for most, his best, or rather his most consistent recordings, date from his London years, or at any rate before Berlin. That’s not to say he wasn’t still capable of great work. And I’m just going by the recordings I’ve heard. I never had the privilege to hear him live.

After years of ill health (he was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2000), Abbado died in 2014 at the age of 80.

I don’t pretend to have heard everything, but here are some of my favorite Abbado recordings:

Debussy: Three Nocturnes; Ravel: Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2; Scriabin: Poem of Ecstasy (w/Boston Symphony Orchestra)

Debussy: La Damoiselle élue (w/soprano Maria Ewing and the London Symphony Orchestra)

Mendelssohn: Complete Symphonies (w/London Symphony Orchestra)

Schubert: Rosamunde: Complete Incidental Music (w/Chamber Orchestra of Europe)

Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 3, etc. (w/Martha Argerich and the Berlin Philharmonic)

Mussorgsky works for orchestra and chorus (w/London Symphony Orchestra)

I am less well-versed in his recordings of contemporary works by Luigi Nono, Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, etc.

I am also not as familiar with many of his opera recordings (beyond Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” and “Khovanshchina” and Schubert’s “Fierrabras”), but some of them are said to be very fine indeed. I would think Debussy’s “Pelleas and Melisande” is a safe bet, and Berg’s “Wozzeck” is regarded as a classic. But some of his Verdi recordings (“Macbeth,” “Simon Boccanegra”) have been ecstatically reviewed.

Some of the recordings I recommend are from after 1989, but of those, none of them are in Berlin. Even the one Berlin recording is from well before he was chief conductor there.

Great video of Argerich and Abbado, in all their glory, live in concert

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIKn4hz0A7I

Young Abbado conducting Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”

Prokofiev, Argerich and Abbado live in Paris

Rehearsing the storm in Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony