Beethoven Piano Concertos 1 and 5 – Gieseking

There is something faintly absurd about listening to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto recorded in Berlin in January 1945 and reflecting that the city outside the studio was weeks from total ruin. Music & Arts makes much of the technical novelty here — a stereo relay, or something approximating it, surviving from the war’s last winter, a genuine curiosity for the engineers among us. But the historical frisson matters less to me than what Gieseking actually does with the piece, which is play it as though Armageddon were not, in fact, on schedule.

He was an odd match for Beethoven, or so the received wisdom has always had it. Gieseking’s reputation rests on Debussy and Ravel, on that famous evanescent touch, the pedaling that seemed to conjure mist rather than tone. Put him in front of the Emperor and you might expect something too soft-grained, too impressionistic for music that wants granite as much as air. You would be wrong, mostly. The first movement has genuine breadth. Rother’s Grosses Funkorchester, essentially the RIAS forces under wartime branding, supplies a surprisingly virile orchestral frame, brass biting where it should, and Gieseking rides above it with a firmness of articulation that the Debussy specialist in him never quite abandons but never lets dominate either. The famous unaccompanied flourishes that open the work have swagger without vulgarity. No small feat.

Where he really persuades is the slow movement. That hushed B major theme, marked Adagio un poco mosso, becomes under his fingers something genuinely inward, almost improvisatory in its rubato, the kind of playing that makes you forget you’re listening to a famous “problem” of transition into the finale rather than a piece unto itself. The recorded sound is filtered, boxy, occasionally swimming in and out of focus as 1945 tape or disc technology will do, and somehow this doesn’t ruin the intimacy. If anything the fragility of the source adds to it. You sit forward.

The transfer, done by Aaron Z. Snyder in 2004, replaces two earlier Music & Arts efforts from 1990 and 1994 that I have not heard and cannot compare, though longtime collectors of this repertoire will know the label’s history of returning to its own catalogue with improved technical means. I’ll take the engineers’ word that this is the superior remastering. Certainly nothing here sounds compromised beyond what the disc’s circumstances would lead you to expect.

The Gieseking/Kubelik account of the First Concerto, taped three years later at Abbey Road under more civilized conditions, is a different animal altogether: lighter, quicker off the mark, almost Mozartian in its scale, which is exactly right for a concerto that still has one foot in the eighteenth century. Kubelik, still in his early thirties and not yet the podium eminence he’d become in Chicago and Munich, shapes the first movement with real wit. The orchestra’s articulation is crisp without being brittle, and Gieseking’s passagework has a pearled clarity that reminds you why his Mozart recordings remain treasured. The slow movement breathes naturally, the clarinetist deserves a bow of his or her own for some lovely solo work, and altogether the first two movements are among the most winning things I’ve heard from this partnership.

The finale, though, sags. Kubelik pulls back the tempo to a degree that drains the rondo of its requisite mischief. Everything remains tidy, nothing goes wrong exactly, but the music needs to skip and instead it merely walks. It’s a small disappointment after such a promising start, the kind of letdown that makes you wonder whether an extra take might have loosened things up, or whether studio time simply ran short that October afternoon in 1948.

Should you want this coupling? If you already own Gieseking’s celebrated Karajan-conducted traversal of the complete Beethoven concertos from the early ‘50s, a set that has never really left the catalogue and shouldn’t, this disc functions more as a historical supplement than a first choice. But the wartime Emperor is a genuine document, sonic limitations and all, and the First Concerto’s opening two movements are worth the price of admission on their own. Recommended, with the finale forgiven rather than forgotten.