This is a recording made at concerts Rudolf Buchbinder gave with Zubin Mehta and the VPO in the Goldener Saal of the Vienna Musikverein in March 2015. He’s a fine player and you have to admire the stamina of someone at nearly 70 who can give the two Brahms concertos in a single evening. Perhaps one should admire the audience’s stamina too. He began with No 2 in B flat and says that he always plays No 1 in D minor after the interval since ‘there is really nothing else that can follow it – it is simply too inspired’.

The booklet, rather a muddle in English, is much more about Buchbinder than Brahms, as if inviting acclaim for the vision and insights he brings to these monumental pieces rather than the character and variety the composer took such pains to enshrine in them. Buchbinder has recorded them twice before – with Harnoncourt and the Concertgebouw, and more recently with Mehta again and the Israel PO – and I must be fair to him: whatever you think of his sensibility and limitations, there are few players who can command these pieces technically as completely as he does.

They are driven pretty hard, particularly in their first movements, with the sound full and the attack powerful as if we needed constantly to be reminded of Brahms’s massiveness. But I do like the strictness of tempo. Where others might see cues for easings, or at least a glance to left and right, soloist and conductor keep going, straight down the middle, which is probably close to what the composer intended. Doubts occur when there seems not enough variety of weight and expression. The middle of the first movement of No 2, after the big climax piano and orchestra build in F minor, is so rich in incident and colour that a traversal of it as if there were nothing that required differentiation is bound to seem inadequate. Pianists accepting the old nonsense about these concertos being really ‘symphonies with piano’ are frequently guilty of such misconceptions. Let me suggest listening to one who isn’t: Nicholas Angelich, with the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra and Paavo Järvi, who characterises the shifting subtleties between the solo part and the orchestra with an eloquence born of long experience with Brahms’s chamber music. I revisit his version of No 2 always with delight. The Concerto isn’t a piece of chamber music writ large but an ease with the play of its dialogues is key to it.

Buchbinder can nevertheless do very good things. In the second movement (the scherzo) he reduces his intensity in the second theme (tranquillo e dolce – 0'37") and plays this section with all the light and shade and fluency of rhythmic inflection that you too rarely hear from others. He slackens the tempo slightly but re-establishes it as soon as we reach the ‘first time’ bar and go back to the appassionato beginning. I sat up again in the third movement at the passage of rapt stillness where the piano is in distant conversation with the pair of clarinets: Buchbinder’s response to the magic makes you hold your breath.

By the end of the First Concerto, played after No 2 at the concerts, you can tell that Buchbinder is tiring and glad to reach the finishing line. The VPO, sumptuously recorded, are with him throughout but the performance of the finale isn’t distinguished. The second movement, the threnody for Schumann, disappointed me also. In the best versions – from Solomon with Kubelík and the Philharmonia in 1952, through Curzon with Szell and the LSO, to Brendel with Abbado, Pollini also with Abbado and Bishop-Kovacevich with Sawallisch – you wait for the piano’s first solo in this Adagio in the expectation that it will draw you into a new dimension of interiority and feeling, after the orchestra has set the scene. Buchbinder is perfunctory and doesn’t manage it. There’s more to admire in the opening Maestoso where he shows it can have a convincing aspect without being slow. Don’t look to him, however, for a varied Romantic discourse with windows opened from time to time on to Wunderhorn nature – the articulation of heroic drama is more his thing.