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Food for thought. I'll listen to Levin and
Gardiner. But playing havoc with tempi, meter, "tense and
nervous," the wild, contrapuntal cadenzas, and even lack of subtlety: all
true and, perhaps, all reasons why I prefer Gould's Beethoven pc
1!
J.G.
I've enjoyed the Gould series of Beethoven
concertos for at least 20 years, and find them delightful. Still,
though, I'm not entirely happy with that #1. To me it sounds tense and
nervous, and the orchestral playing lacks subtlety and blend. (Like a
mixture of sight-reading and just trying to keep up.) And in the way
GG launches into the final movement, the meter is too ambiguous: the first
note sounds like a downbeat rather than an upbeat. Those two
completely wacky anachronistic cadenzas are fun, though!
Right now I particularly enjoy the new
recording by Robert Levin with John Eliot Gardiner. It's energetic but
also relaxed enough, not driven like a race. The cadenzas are
fresh...they're improvised! The phrasing makes perfect sense, with a
natural differentiation of strong and weak notes. All very well
done.
One last query/rhetorical qustion: is there a
better interpretation to be found anywhere of Beeth. PC 1 than
Gould's with Golshman? (Answer: NO, no one has ever recorded a
more compelling version of that concerto; and Gould also gives us a
2nd and a 4th that is at the top of the heap!)
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