John Lill is deeply versed in the music of Beethoven. The 32 piano sonatas have always been near the heart of his repertory. So this cycle of concertos and Bagatelles is in no sense the kind of Cook's Tour ('if it's Tuesday it must be Beethoven') we have occasionally had on record from more expensively packaged pianists.
Framing the concertos with the Bagatelles is a particularly interesting idea, illustrating as they do the range of pianistic falderal Beethoven treated himself to during and after his years as the great composer-performer. On the first disc, early Bagatelles in C minor and major complement the concertos in C major and minor, but the main body Opp. 33, 119 and 126 comes as addenda to Concertos Nos. 2, 4 and 5 on the set's remaining two CDs. No one, as far as I know, has done this before, though it isn't too difficult to assemble such a programme from the four CDs of concertos and Bagatelles that Stephen Kovacevich recorded for Philips in the mid-1970s. (At much the same time as Lill's earlier concerto cycle with Gibson and the SNO for CfP, now available on separate discs at bargain price.)
The biggest group of Bagatelles—Op. 119—is the least coherent as a cycle. Beethoven demanded a substantial sum from the publisher Peters and got a flea in his ear: ''Your pieces are not worth the price and you should consider it beneath your dignity to waste your time with such trivial things that anybody could write''. Not all pianists agree. Schnabel recorded the set in 1938 (nla) with a wonderful mixture of inwardness and wit—profoundly, yet without ever allowing the music to live beyond its means. Lill achieves much the same kind of effect, though not immediately. Where Schnabel plays the G minor opening perkily, pointing up minor-key wit before the major-key pathos at the con anima, Lill's approach is plainer, everything seemingly cut from the same cloth yet the further we go into the piece, the more searching Lill's playing becomes. It is wonderful to hear such a capacity for exploration in so short a space.
In general, as in the concertos, Lill refuses to overpoint dynamic contrasts. (That way mannerism lies, as Brendel revealed on an old Turnabout disc of the Bagatelles—9/65, nla.) Lill takes a spacious view of the D major a l'Allemande, is relatively quick in the C minor Risoluto, and polishes off the 20-bar A major Allegramente with true Beethovenian cheek in about eight seconds. In general, though, as with Schnabel, it is Lill's full-voiced and lofty way with the profounder numbers that most stays in the imagination—the A major Andante cantabile, the C major cantabile No. 8, and the concluding Andante ma non troppo in B flat.
The Op. 126 group is even finer—but then it is even finer music, a cycle of Bagatelles that is very much of a piece. Schnabel, for all his insights into this extraordinary 'late' Beethoven, muffed most of the quicker music—the B minor Bagatelle and the Presto launch of the very last piece of all. Lill by contrast, plays with marvellous energy and control, the music never less than tellingly elucidated.
In the concertos, I find myself listening most attentively when the pianist himself is to the fore—in cadenzas, in the lofty discourse of all five slow movements (the Largo of No. 3 is one of the set's obvious highlights), and in the finales where it is the pianist rather than the orchestra who is setting the agenda. Concerto No. 3, often the most elusive in performance, is notable from beginning to end; a reading of unwavering cogency that puts the work into the same arena (if not the actual lofty sphere) of the Overture Coriolan and the Fifth Symphony. There are few more convincing recorded performances than this.
The C major Concerto is almost as good, though there are times when one needs a more focused orchestral response. This is partly the fault of the recording. The concerto sessions took place in Birmingham Town Hall. In the First and Fifth (the first to be recorded) the woodwinds are unduly backward. I would also argue that the early B flat Concerto needs an altogether closer and more intimate acoustic than the one we have here.
The B flat Concerto could also do with more pointed, more committed, orchestral playing. The mark of a truly great orchestra is its capacity to listen to a singer or a soloist, irrespective of who is conducting. I have heard Beethoven playing of the utmost alertness from the CBSO under Rattle. But it seems that when Sir is out of the room, the lads are less inclined to be on their best behaviour. Where they do engage with the soloist—as in the C minor and E flat Concertos—the results are first-rate. There are times, though, when the soloist is palpably ahead of both conductor and orchestra in commitment and musical intelligence. In the G major, which must be a nightmare to accompany, there is a slightly brittle, halting feel to the first movement which is perhaps as much Lill's doing as anyone's. But, again, the orchestra's all-purpose legato phrasing makes for a curiously disjunct response to what the soloist is attempting to say. Here it really is a pleasure when the cadenza finally arrives.
Some occasionally reticent woodwinds apart, the Fifth Concerto is finely done. But, then, this is a work that renders difference heroic. The quasi-symphonic orchestral writing, here richly and spaciously unfolded, is ground that both nurtures the protagonist and launches him. Like Cromwell in Andrew Marvell's famous formulation, Beethoven is here to set to ''cast the Kingdom old/Into another mould''. What is remarkable about Lill's performance is his realization of the piano's energy and vaunting majesty in the outer movements, offset by the chilly stellar beauty of the piano-writing in the Adagio. With the Opp.33 and 126 Bagatelles as make-weights (splendidly recorded in The Maltings, Snape) this will be a formidable CD when issued separately.'