This is a remarkable record, as fine a recorded account of these two concertos as we have had for many a long year.
At first, I was merely intrigued. Intrigued, among other things, by Rattle’s stylistic eclecticism: the repeated, rhetorically grand high As in bar 9 of the C major Concerto played drily, without vibrato, followed in the next bar by a tenderly nursed legato which drops us down via an exquisitely caught grace-note on to the repeated Fs in bar 12 which Rattle nurses, tapering the dynamics, in a way you might fancy Bruno Walter doing. The tempo, too, cunningly chosen and shrewdly propelled, suggests urgency without haste, vibrancy at no risk to decorum.
Lars Vogt’s first entry is rather the opposite. Brilliant and playful, yes. Ingratiating, certainly not. This, though, is a blind, for as the music unfolds so the poetry starts seeping through. And then one starts thinking of other poet-virtuosos in this repertory: Gilels with Vandernoot and the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra back in the 1950s (Columbia, 10/59 – nla) or Kempff’s mono recordings with van Kempen (on a three-disc set) and his stereo remakes with Leitner.
So the larger picture begins to emerge: performances that are, above all, wonderfully and intriguingly various in their response to the music, Vogt’s playfulness and capacity for dreaming realized in the context of an orchestral accompaniment whose own stylistic variousness is no gimmick. This is no pick-‘n’-mix reworking of this fashion or that. Rather, it is an absorbingly thought-through response to the music’s chameleon spirit and Lars Vogt’s keenly felt response to it.
Alongside these performances, most rivals sound unduly one-dimensional. (Even Murray Perahia’s readings, where the recording now sounds rather cloudy in comparison with the clear, brightly lit, new EMI version.) Vogt’s playing in the two slow movements is wonderfully pellucid, but deep too. Again one thinks of Kempff, here and in the exquisite shaping of the lyric meditation midway through the Second Concerto’s first movement (at 4'00''ff.). The CBSO’s playing is also a miracle of finely wrought colours, much as it was, live in the concert-hall, when Rattle and the orchestra played these works with Brendel a couple of years ago. Unlike some contemporary conductors of the classic repertoire who have taken aboard theories of period practice, Rattle remains profoundly interested in orchestral colour, in weights and volumes of sound, in a way that the old masters were. (Furtwangler used to say that of all the necessary conducting skills, the most difficult to master was how to draw from the orchestra a true legato sound: not least because it is something that is more or less unteachable. Banish the need for legato and conducting gets easier by the minute.)
Rattle and Vogt balance these competing elements – the pursuit of beauty and the pursuit of other kinds of musical truth – superbly. Yet, despite the fact that these performances have evidently been worked out with great care, they remain spontaneously alive in a way that is rare on record. In the B flat Concerto, the dialogue between soloist and orchestra in the first movement has a Haydnesque alertness. This has the twin charm of being infinitely diverting whilst at the same time ‘placing’ the concerto stylistically in a way that most rival performances don’t begin to do. The slow movement is exquisitely done; the finale is an almost perfect re-enactment of Beethoven’s impish game of musical hide-and-seek.
I have mentioned Kempff. But it is clear that Vogt is also a great admirer of Glenn Gould. So much so that we have here a rather strange ‘bonus’. The performance of the First Concerto is reprinted on a separate CD not with Beethoven’s cadenzas (Vogt uses the big third cadenza in the first movement of the main performance) but with Gould’s. Since Gould’s own performances of these charming, earnest and weirdly fanciful lucubrations are to be had as part of his own absorbingly interesting cycle of the five concertos (on a three-disc set), this could be said to be a somewhat supererogatory act.
It is fun, though. It would not sway me one way or another in deciding whether or not to buy the record. But, then, who needs further persuasion when faced with performances of this order of delight?'