The opening, threefold flourish of the Emperor Concerto has always seemed to me the herald of a work of huge, and self-aware, grandeur; that is certainly how it is generally played, with due weight, deliberation and sense of rhetoric. Beethoven's espressivo markings towards the end of the first two parts of the flourish certainly seem to demand something of the kind. In this extraordinarily fine and highly provocative performance on period instruments it is simply a flourish, brilliant, to be sure, but with no special implications about what is to follow.
And perhaps that is right, because what follows is not the Emperor we are used to but a work expressively much leaner. The tempos, of course, are quickish, in Roger Norrington's usual manner. Not just Norrington's. Beethoven left no metronome markings for this work, but his pupil Carl Czerny did. It would be tempting to make some gibe about the School of Velocity, one of the works by which Czerny is best known to embryo pianists; but the fact is that he was an approved interpreter of Beethoven's works and gave an early performance of the Emperor, and his authority is beyond dispute. The tuttis here have an athletic energy and precision which I find very compelling the first of them strikes one as marvellously crisp, with clean and accurate woodwind and the trumpets shining through the texture with their descending broken-chord figure in response to the violins' ascending one. The piano's main entry which Beethoven marked dolce, seems curiously unpretentious; did Beethoven write those full chords in expectation of nothing more than this almost nonchalant reading? In the rival L'Oiseau-Lyre disc listed above, Steven Lubin, more conventionally perhaps, takes a little more time, and allows a glimmer of temper to show during the descending triplets that follow, Melvyn Tan treats them quite coolly, and the effect is more brilliant and expressively rather non-committal. The light passages that follow with interplay between piano and woodwind make a fine effect, fluent and glittering, with a perfectly held balance, but the high piano theme (in C flat, bar 159) over which most pianists lovingly linger, draws little apparent response from the austere Tan: the music moves along uniformly with no hint that anyone feels a need for particular poetry here. Nor does Tan react much to the heroic, striving music at the close of the exposition, though the brilliant and delicate piano writing in the development is cleanly and fleetly executed. The performance is very much of a piece, and it was no surprise to me that the arrival of the recapitulation, usually so big a moment, carries very little rhetorical weight here; the same goes for the tutti preceding the cadenza. I am content to trade some of this for the thrilling sound of the fortepiano with period orchestral instruments, which reveals so much that is sometimes lost (listen for example to the piano textures in the coda, at the passage starting in bar 562; usually so confusing, here beautiful and wholly original), but I am not convinced that the loss is necessary, and Lubin's more effortful less deft performance does seem to me to go deeper.
Tan's kind of pianism tends, I think, to emphasize the closeness of Beethoven not only to Mozart but also to Chopin, and this may strike listeners particularly in the Adagio, with the high piano writing and floating lines. Czerny's tempo here is crotchet = 60; while the fast movements are about 7 per cent quicker than Lubin's, the slow movement is 38 per cent quicker. There is little dawdling, and gentle pathos rather than profound contemplation, though I am not entirely convinced that even at this speed greater expressive depth is unattainable. The finale has plenty of exuberance and brilliance and Tan plays it commandingly, but if you expect grandeur and mystery you may feel slightly short-changed. While the sheer keyboard mastery of Tan and the razor-keen playing of Norrington's group are in a class by themselves, and enormously exciting simply for what they are, I am not sure that I don't find the performance by Lubin and the AAM more persuasive as a whole.
The new disc has the advantage of offering in addition the Choral Fantasia. Not a large advantage: this is one of Beethoven's weakest and clumsiest works, with its oddly handled forces and some banal invention. It is, however, quite entertaining and its foreshadowing of the Choral Symphony is fascinating. This is as convincing a performance as I have ever heard, done with a fine swing to the rhythms, cleanly played by Tan and well sung. In all a very attractive and stimulating disc.'