Beethoven Piano Concertos 4 and 5 – Arrau

Some ghosts are welcome. Claudio Arrau’s presence hovers over the Shed at Tanglewood in these two recordings, and what he left there, we now get to hear, more than half a century later.

Arrau never made a fetish of interpretive novelty. He trusted the text, trusted his own technical security, and let the architecture of a piece speak on its own authority. That approach could occasionally read as aloof on records made under studio conditions, where every phrase has to justify itself in isolation. Live, at Tanglewood, under summer canvas, something else emerges: a performer relaxing into the music’s long paragraphs rather than merely delivering them.

The Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, op. 58 finds him partnered by Charles Munch, not an obvious match on paper. Munch’s reputation rests on Gallic color and a certain electric impulsiveness, the conductor who could make the Boston Symphony sound like it was combusting in Berlioz or Ravel. Beethoven’s fourth concerto wants patience, wants the space to unfold its curious opening gesture — that hushed, private statement from the soloist before the orchestra has even cleared its throat — and let it breathe outward. Munch doesn’t force his usual temperament onto the music. He listens. The orchestral entries have shape and weight without bluster, and the give-and-take between piano and strings in the first movement has the quality of real conversation.

Arrau’s playing here is thoughtful bordering on ruminative, phrases weighed and turned over rather than tossed off. There’s a small stumble around the nine-minute mark, and a rougher patch in the chordal writing a bit later, the kind of thing a studio splice would have erased without a trace. I’d rather have this than digital perfection with the soul sanded off. The cadenza is unhurried, weighted, inevitable-sounding.

The slow movement — that dialogue where the piano seems to be pleading with an implacable orchestra, Orpheus taming the Furies as generations of annotators have had it — finds Arrau at his coolest and most inward. Munch draws real depth from the Boston strings, dark and burnished, without letting the sound go thick. The finale has energy that never spills into recklessness.

The Emperor is a different animal, recorded in mono but transferred cleanly enough that the sonic limitations recede quickly from consciousness. This is not the same collaboration as the 1957 Arrau-Munch account that surfaced on WHRA some years back, a distinction worth making since collectors will want to know they’re not being sold the same rendition twice under a different disguise. Here the conductor is Pierre Monteux, then in his eighties, a man who had premiered The Rite of Spring and led the Boston Symphony through some of its finest postwar seasons.

Monteux drives the opening tutti with purpose — those three grand chords and the flourishes that answer them have real snap — and once Arrau enters the two men generate a genuine sense of occasion. There’s power here, real weight in the fortissimo octaves, but also an unwillingness to let the lyrical second group get trampled underfoot. The slow movement’s hymn-like serenity requires an entirely different vocabulary, and Arrau supplies it, floating the theme with tonal luster.

Do we need another Emperor in a catalog already crowded with Backhaus, Serkin, Fischer, Gilels, and Arrau’s own studio recordings for Philips? Probably not, on grounds of necessity. But necessity has nothing to do with why anyone collects historical broadcasts. This disc is a document of two musicians meeting in real time, imperfections and all, under a tent in the Berkshires, decades before anyone thought to ask whether it might someday be worth preserving. It was. Get this one for the Fourth concerto especially — it’s the rarer bird, and the finer performance.