Beethoven Piano Concertos
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Ludwig van Beethoven
Label: Gold Seal
Magazine Review Date: 4/1993
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 197
Mastering:
Stereo
Mono
ADD
Catalogue Number: 09026 61260-2
Tracks:
| Composition | Artist Credit |
|---|---|
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Arthur Rubinstein, Piano Josef Krips, Conductor Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Symphony of the Air (New York) |
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Arthur Rubinstein, Piano Josef Krips, Conductor Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Symphony of the Air (New York) |
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 3 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Arthur Rubinstein, Piano Josef Krips, Conductor Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Symphony of the Air (New York) |
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 4 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Arthur Rubinstein, Piano Josef Krips, Conductor Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Symphony of the Air (New York) |
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 5, 'Emperor' |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Arthur Rubinstein, Piano Josef Krips, Conductor Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Symphony of the Air (New York) |
| Sonata for Piano No. 18, 'Hunt' |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Arthur Rubinstein, Piano Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer |
Composer or Director: Ludwig van Beethoven
Genre:
Orchestral
Label: Dokumente
Magazine Review Date: 4/1993
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 190
Mastering:
Mono
ADD
Catalogue Number: 435 744-2GDO3
Tracks:
| Composition | Artist Credit |
|---|---|
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Paul van Kempen, Conductor Wilhelm Kempff, Piano |
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Paul van Kempen, Conductor Wilhelm Kempff, Piano |
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 3 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Paul van Kempen, Conductor Wilhelm Kempff, Piano |
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 4 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Paul van Kempen, Conductor Wilhelm Kempff, Piano |
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 5, 'Emperor' |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Paul van Kempen, Conductor Wilhelm Kempff, Piano |
| (2) Rondos |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer Wilhelm Kempff, Piano |
Composer or Director: Ludwig van Beethoven
Label: Prague Spring Collection
Magazine Review Date: 4/1993
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 158
Mastering:
ADD
Catalogue Number: 310106-2
Tracks:
| Composition | Artist Credit |
|---|---|
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra Emil Gilels, Piano Kurt Sanderling, Conductor Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer |
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra Emil Gilels, Piano Kurt Sanderling, Conductor Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer |
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 3 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra Emil Gilels, Piano Kurt Sanderling, Conductor Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer |
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 4 |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra Emil Gilels, Piano Kurt Sanderling, Conductor Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer |
| Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 5, 'Emperor' |
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra Emil Gilels, Piano Kurt Sanderling, Conductor Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer |
Author: Richard Osborne
Gilels, Gould and Kempff give us a daunting array of insights into the five Beethoven piano concertos. Rubinstein less so. His RCA cycle recorded over a period of ten days in New York in December 1956, offers engaging readings that never wholly engage. RCA now add to the set the Piano Sonata, Op. 31 No. 3, recorded in mono two years earlier. When this first appeared, Jeremy Noble wrote: ''The very essence of [Rubinstein's] style is a certain aloofness, an unruffled sang-froid. This off-hand elegance, the air of doing something supremely difficult without effort, which pays such wonderful dividends in Chopin, is fundamentally unsuited to Beethoven.'' Rubinstein did make some memorable Beethoven records (a remarkable LP of the Pathetique, Moonlight and Les adieux Sonatas appeared from RCA in June 1963), but, by and large, JN's strictures hold good. The reissued RCA set gives us unsearching and at times careless readings of the concertos. They are loyally, though often lamely, accompanied by Josef Krips. He was a splendid character, but for some reason whenever he conducted for Milord Rubinstein he turned into an obsequious dullard.
Emil Gilels was potentially one of the greatest of all interpreters of these works. At best, he combined a 24 carat technique with an instinctive understanding of the concertos' abundant wit fantasy and drama. Sadly, he was never especially lucky with his formal gramophone commissions. Apart from a famous account of the Fourth Concerto with Ludwig and the Philharmonia Orchestra (4/58—nla), his 1950s EMI recordings (nla) were never much noticed by critics or collectors. (Except on the BBC Third Programme where they shone forth in successive editions of ''Interpretations on Record''.) A cycle of Melodiya recordings, made with Sanderling and the Leningrad PO in 1957, was never widely available in the West. (The Fourth and Fifth Concertos have subsequently appeared on a Chant du Monde CD complete with a disfiguring electronic hum.) A later EMI cycle, with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, also currently unavailable, was a curiously buttoned-up affair.
Now from Multisonic we have the five concertos recorded live on successive evenings in Prague in November 1958. Buttoned-up these performances certainly are not. There is a crazy, frenetic feel about the second of the two concerts devoted to the Fourth and Fifth Concertos. After a rackety ritornello, Gilels launches into a reading of the Fourth Concerto that is both brilliant and introspective. In the end, though, the evening seems jinxed. Gilels makes a hash of the first movement cadenza and later goes catastrophically awry at the piano's re-entry at bar 174 of the Emperor's first movement. Noises off interrupt the progress of the slow movement of the Emperor as the music-making itself becomes ever more bizarre.
The first evening, by contrast, has Gilels at his fiery, leonine best, with some supremely eloquent playing in all three slow movements. True, the finale of the Second Concerto is tremendously quick, more furioso than scherzando, but there is never any hint of the mass derailments of the second evening. Unfortunately, the playing of the Czech Philharmonic is generally abysmal. In the Largo of the Third Concerto one can hear a handful of players in rapt communion with Gilels, but for the most part it is difficult to credit that we are hearing the work of either Sanderling or the Czech PO. The recorded sound is middling to decent. Gilels is well placed, the orchestra mercifully more remote. On the CDs there are lengthy blank silences between movements.
Wilhelm Kempff's 1953 Berlin cycle with Paul van Kempen has long been a collectors' item, often preferred to Kempff's famous 1960s PO/Leitner set, also on DG. Apart from Kempff's whimsical though not ineffective line in home-grown cadenzas, these are exemplary performances in matters of style and execution. Yet they are something more. The 1953 cycle gives an extraordinary sense of the imaginative dimension of the first four concertos. As the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth so the mists of romanticism began to drift across the landscape. It was what Gombrich, writing of the painter Claude, called the concreteness and calm of a dream world. Kempff's 1953 cycle catches that mood in a very special way. The 1960s stereo set has an equally fine First Concerto and a better recordedEmperor. There is generally more glitter and dash. But the Second, Third and Fourth Concertos are all more revealingly realized in 1953.
The 1953 set last appeared on three bargain-price LPs in 1979. Longer playing time on CD allows for unbroken, chronological layouts, and the 1953 mono recordings have also been strikingly refocused. What on LP sounded recessed now takes on a startlingly physical immediacy. Whether this is an advance, I'm not sure. At first it seems to be all gain: the slightly dim sounding ritornellos given a new weight and presence. On the other hand, the recordings are now rather more wearing on the ear. (On headphones, which I abhor, you also get some tape hiss.) In the Emperor Concerto, for example, the mono recording sounds—and makes the piano sound—much coarser than one had remembered. Generally I don't meddle with filters as I have never had the faintest idea how they work. On this occasion though it was only with suitable doctoring that I was able to come up with a tolerable mix of new-found immediacy and old-fashioned clarity and warmth. A marvellous set, none the less.
Finally, Glen Gould. And it is astonishing to discover that neither his 1957 recording of the Second Concerto nor his 1961 recording of the Fourth has previously been available in the UK. Which only goes to show that certain prophets are not without honour save in their own country and in quite a few other places besides.
Gould once wrote of the Beethoven concertos: ''It was in the Fourth Concerto that the ultimate of condensation, of unity with the solo exposition, of imagination, and of discipline was attained''. And, my goodness, how that idea is realized here in a performance (conducted by Bernstein) of quite exceptional trenchancy and musical cosanguinity. (A technical miracle given the impossible layouts and sight-lines imposed on the players by the Manhattan Center; the ensemble here is actually better than it is in the far less problematic Emperor, also recorded—under protest from Gould—in the Center.)
Gould learned the Fourth Concerto, as he frequently confessed, from the old 1942 Schnabel/Stock recording on RCA. He even found himself using the 78rpm side-breaks as chapter-ends in the evolving musical argument. So pervasive was the Schnabel influence, as a lad of 13 making his debut at the Toronto Conservatory Gould tried to cover his tracks by superimposing a certain ''brisk, Serkinesque dispatch'' with a smattering of ''Casadesusish elan''. All this: and yet in 1961 Gould came up with as original and idiosyncratic an account of the Fourth Concerto as any that has been put on record.
To many it will instantly be ruled out by Gould's obsession with the left hand, his numerous unusual voicings and his frequent splitting of chords. But none of this is arbitrary. Rather, it is an elaborate exercise in scholarly exegesis firmly centred on Gould's preoccupation, not with the concerto's melodic elements, but with its structural-harmonic ones. It is, if you like, a lecture-recital on the concerto, with special emphasis on its myriad harmonic constituencies. The first of Beethoven's first movement cadenzas is hair-raisingly deft (''Schnabel lives!'' I hear Gould cry) but elsewhere deliberation is of the essence. The slow movement is astonishingly slow but (pace DJF on a recent BBC Radio 3 ''Building a Library'') utterly spell-binding. Only in the furthest reaches of the finale is there any hint of Bernstein starting a tempo war with his all too absorbed soloist. Throughout, the playing and the wonderfully immediate and full-bodied CBS recording, give the work a physically thrilling, three-dimensional feel. This is a performance that spells out the concerto—imagines, articulates and physically celebrates it—in a way guaranteed to turn body and mind into a single erogenous zone.
The other performance ''new to the UK'' (shameful phrase) is of Concerto No. 2. Here Gould and Bernstein conjure up a wonderfully uncomplicated performance high on musical intelligence and untrammelled vitality. As in Concerto No. 1, Gould plays the slow movement with sustained inwardness, at the same time preferring a somewhat etiolated manner in some of the solo statements. For the rest, Gould is in something of a brown study in the first movement of the Third Concerto. (He was never happy with the music's structure, and to some extent it shows.) The Emperor with Stokowski is quirky in its ''martial melancholy'' (Gould's phrase), but hardly ''quirky to the point of absurdity'' (EG's judgement at the time of the original release). A less absurdist Emperor it would be difficult to imagine.
Deryck Cooke found Gould's 1958 account of the First Concerto with Golschmann and the Columbia SO ''austere''. True, there is a cool Northern beauty about the Largo, but the outer movements are unusually brilliant. Gould's quick tempos in the first movement shows particularly sound musical instincts, though the cadenza, a Reger-like fugal fancy of Gould's own devising, may be a shade academic for some tastes.
In sum, ignore the Rubinstein, avoid the Gilels, acquire the Kempff, and, above all, hear the Gould.'
Emil Gilels was potentially one of the greatest of all interpreters of these works. At best, he combined a 24 carat technique with an instinctive understanding of the concertos' abundant wit fantasy and drama. Sadly, he was never especially lucky with his formal gramophone commissions. Apart from a famous account of the Fourth Concerto with Ludwig and the Philharmonia Orchestra (4/58—nla), his 1950s EMI recordings (nla) were never much noticed by critics or collectors. (Except on the BBC Third Programme where they shone forth in successive editions of ''Interpretations on Record''.) A cycle of Melodiya recordings, made with Sanderling and the Leningrad PO in 1957, was never widely available in the West. (The Fourth and Fifth Concertos have subsequently appeared on a Chant du Monde CD complete with a disfiguring electronic hum.) A later EMI cycle, with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, also currently unavailable, was a curiously buttoned-up affair.
Now from Multisonic we have the five concertos recorded live on successive evenings in Prague in November 1958. Buttoned-up these performances certainly are not. There is a crazy, frenetic feel about the second of the two concerts devoted to the Fourth and Fifth Concertos. After a rackety ritornello, Gilels launches into a reading of the Fourth Concerto that is both brilliant and introspective. In the end, though, the evening seems jinxed. Gilels makes a hash of the first movement cadenza and later goes catastrophically awry at the piano's re-entry at bar 174 of the Emperor's first movement. Noises off interrupt the progress of the slow movement of the Emperor as the music-making itself becomes ever more bizarre.
The first evening, by contrast, has Gilels at his fiery, leonine best, with some supremely eloquent playing in all three slow movements. True, the finale of the Second Concerto is tremendously quick, more furioso than scherzando, but there is never any hint of the mass derailments of the second evening. Unfortunately, the playing of the Czech Philharmonic is generally abysmal. In the Largo of the Third Concerto one can hear a handful of players in rapt communion with Gilels, but for the most part it is difficult to credit that we are hearing the work of either Sanderling or the Czech PO. The recorded sound is middling to decent. Gilels is well placed, the orchestra mercifully more remote. On the CDs there are lengthy blank silences between movements.
Wilhelm Kempff's 1953 Berlin cycle with Paul van Kempen has long been a collectors' item, often preferred to Kempff's famous 1960s PO/Leitner set, also on DG. Apart from Kempff's whimsical though not ineffective line in home-grown cadenzas, these are exemplary performances in matters of style and execution. Yet they are something more. The 1953 cycle gives an extraordinary sense of the imaginative dimension of the first four concertos. As the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth so the mists of romanticism began to drift across the landscape. It was what Gombrich, writing of the painter Claude, called the concreteness and calm of a dream world. Kempff's 1953 cycle catches that mood in a very special way. The 1960s stereo set has an equally fine First Concerto and a better recorded
The 1953 set last appeared on three bargain-price LPs in 1979. Longer playing time on CD allows for unbroken, chronological layouts, and the 1953 mono recordings have also been strikingly refocused. What on LP sounded recessed now takes on a startlingly physical immediacy. Whether this is an advance, I'm not sure. At first it seems to be all gain: the slightly dim sounding ritornellos given a new weight and presence. On the other hand, the recordings are now rather more wearing on the ear. (On headphones, which I abhor, you also get some tape hiss.) In the Emperor Concerto, for example, the mono recording sounds—and makes the piano sound—much coarser than one had remembered. Generally I don't meddle with filters as I have never had the faintest idea how they work. On this occasion though it was only with suitable doctoring that I was able to come up with a tolerable mix of new-found immediacy and old-fashioned clarity and warmth. A marvellous set, none the less.
Finally, Glen Gould. And it is astonishing to discover that neither his 1957 recording of the Second Concerto nor his 1961 recording of the Fourth has previously been available in the UK. Which only goes to show that certain prophets are not without honour save in their own country and in quite a few other places besides.
Gould once wrote of the Beethoven concertos: ''It was in the Fourth Concerto that the ultimate of condensation, of unity with the solo exposition, of imagination, and of discipline was attained''. And, my goodness, how that idea is realized here in a performance (conducted by Bernstein) of quite exceptional trenchancy and musical cosanguinity. (A technical miracle given the impossible layouts and sight-lines imposed on the players by the Manhattan Center; the ensemble here is actually better than it is in the far less problematic Emperor, also recorded—under protest from Gould—in the Center.)
Gould learned the Fourth Concerto, as he frequently confessed, from the old 1942 Schnabel/Stock recording on RCA. He even found himself using the 78rpm side-breaks as chapter-ends in the evolving musical argument. So pervasive was the Schnabel influence, as a lad of 13 making his debut at the Toronto Conservatory Gould tried to cover his tracks by superimposing a certain ''brisk, Serkinesque dispatch'' with a smattering of ''Casadesusish elan''. All this: and yet in 1961 Gould came up with as original and idiosyncratic an account of the Fourth Concerto as any that has been put on record.
To many it will instantly be ruled out by Gould's obsession with the left hand, his numerous unusual voicings and his frequent splitting of chords. But none of this is arbitrary. Rather, it is an elaborate exercise in scholarly exegesis firmly centred on Gould's preoccupation, not with the concerto's melodic elements, but with its structural-harmonic ones. It is, if you like, a lecture-recital on the concerto, with special emphasis on its myriad harmonic constituencies. The first of Beethoven's first movement cadenzas is hair-raisingly deft (''Schnabel lives!'' I hear Gould cry) but elsewhere deliberation is of the essence. The slow movement is astonishingly slow but (pace DJF on a recent BBC Radio 3 ''Building a Library'') utterly spell-binding. Only in the furthest reaches of the finale is there any hint of Bernstein starting a tempo war with his all too absorbed soloist. Throughout, the playing and the wonderfully immediate and full-bodied CBS recording, give the work a physically thrilling, three-dimensional feel. This is a performance that spells out the concerto—imagines, articulates and physically celebrates it—in a way guaranteed to turn body and mind into a single erogenous zone.
The other performance ''new to the UK'' (shameful phrase) is of Concerto No. 2. Here Gould and Bernstein conjure up a wonderfully uncomplicated performance high on musical intelligence and untrammelled vitality. As in Concerto No. 1, Gould plays the slow movement with sustained inwardness, at the same time preferring a somewhat etiolated manner in some of the solo statements. For the rest, Gould is in something of a brown study in the first movement of the Third Concerto. (He was never happy with the music's structure, and to some extent it shows.) The Emperor with Stokowski is quirky in its ''martial melancholy'' (Gould's phrase), but hardly ''quirky to the point of absurdity'' (EG's judgement at the time of the original release). A less absurdist Emperor it would be difficult to imagine.
Deryck Cooke found Gould's 1958 account of the First Concerto with Golschmann and the Columbia SO ''austere''. True, there is a cool Northern beauty about the Largo, but the outer movements are unusually brilliant. Gould's quick tempos in the first movement shows particularly sound musical instincts, though the cadenza, a Reger-like fugal fancy of Gould's own devising, may be a shade academic for some tastes.
In sum, ignore the Rubinstein, avoid the Gilels, acquire the Kempff, and, above all, hear the Gould.'
Beethoven Complete Piano Concertos, etc
Beethoven Piano Concertos
Beethoven Prague Radio Recordings (1958)
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