Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 – Alexej Gorlatch

Some competition tapes sound exactly like what they are — nervous, over-rehearsed, airless. This one doesn’t, and that alone is worth remarking on.

Alexej Gorlatch was twenty-three when he won the ARD competition in Munich in 2011. Mitsuko Uchida came through there, as did Thomas Quasthoff and Yuri Bashmet, and the jury’s track record over sixty years carries a certain weight even for those of us who distrust competitions on principle. For the finals he chose the Beethoven C minor concerto, op. 37. Hardly a modest choice. BR Klassik caught the performance live for broadcast. What survives on disc is a young pianist working at full stretch but not straining, which is rarer than it should be.

The opening tutti under Sebastian Tewinkel has real bite. The Bavarian radio orchestra’s strings dig into that grim unison theme with an almost theatrical hush, and I recalled hearing this same band a few nights earlier in this hall, playing with the kind of corporate polish that comes from decades of first-rate music-making rather than any particular interpretive agenda. Gorlatch enters carefully, maybe too carefully at first. There’s a stiffness in the first pages that I suspect is nerves, the sound a shade cautious, phrases not quite unbuttoned. But it doesn’t last. By the development he has loosened into something genuinely alive: crisp fingerwork, an unforced sense of forward motion, and a feel for the music’s underlying strangeness. Beethoven wrote this concerto in the shadow of Mozart’s K. 491, another C minor essay in troubled grandeur, and too many pianists play straight through that darkness toward Romantic heroics. Gorlatch doesn’t rush past the mystery. He sits in it.

The Largo is the heart of the reading. E major, marked Largo rather than Adagio, and Beethoven asks for something almost otherworldly here: chords voiced with the hands wide apart, a texture that seems to come from nowhere and lead nowhere, suspended. Gorlatch plays it with a stillness that never curdles into preciousness. There’s an isolation in his voicing, a kind of private grief under the surface nobility, and the woodwind exchanges, those hushed, chorale-like responses, breathe with him rather than merely accompanying. I’ve heard grander accounts of this movement — Serkin with Szell remains a touchstone, and no one since has quite matched that combination of granite and tenderness — but few more inward ones.

The finale bursts in with real exhilaration. Rising arpeggios tossed off with a rhythmic snap that had me sitting forward. There’s a sneeze from someone in the hall around the one-minute mark, an intrusion that made me smile rather than wince. Live music-making carries these accidents, and a release that pretended otherwise would feel embalmed.

The disc is filled out with the op. 2 no. 1 sonata in F minor, the first of the canonical thirty-two, dedicated to Haydn and written when Beethoven was still very much auditioning as Vienna’s next great keyboard lion. It’s a curious pairing chronologically, juvenilia beside a mature masterpiece, but it makes sense as a portrait of a young artist measuring himself against Beethoven at different ages. Gorlatch’s reading is alert, sensibly paced, the Menuetto light on its feet. Though I confess it doesn’t erase memories of Annie Fischer’s mercurial way with these early sonatas, or Richard Goode’s wry, conversational phrasing.

Taken as a whole this is a debut that promises more than it fully delivers, which is exactly as it should be at twenty-three. The Beethoven concerto stands up against far starrier discographies than one might expect from a live competition tape, and that Largo alone justifies the disc’s existence. Recommended, with real interest in what comes next.