As I explained last week, in the post "Found Music Dept.: When music that pops into your path grabs hold and won't let go," the "found music" that made such an impact on me came in an early episode of the FX-via-Netflix series Pose, when 17-year-old Damon (Ryan Jamaal Swain), whom we see here making his way to NYC, having been thrown out of his home for dreaming of being a dancer (and, oh yes, being gay), has his world turned upside-down when he gets his first glimpse of real, live ballet, in the form of a dance choreographed to music by the Dance King himself.
Claudio Arrau, piano; Staatskapelle Dresden, Sir Colin Davis, cond. Philips, recorded November 1984
Alfred Brendel, piano; Vienna Philharmonic, Sir Simon Rattle, cond. Philips, recorded February 1998
Leif Ove Andsnes, piano and cond.; Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Sony, recorded in Prague, May 20-21, 2014
by Ken
Of the music in question, I wrote in Part 1 of this week's post earlier today ("Revisiting our musical glimpse into the sublime, Part 1"), "It's a piece I know about as well as I know my own name," which though accurate may have been a trifle misleading, in that these days there are moments when I give some thought to dredge up my name, and the truth is that while I knew the composer right away, it took me a bit to home in on the identity of the piece, of which I went on to write: "I don't think I'd ever heard it in quite this way: as a prime example of Beethoven's singular ability to give us a musical glimpse into the sublime."
The fact that it did take me a bit to make the positive ID puzzled me, and the best guess I came up with is that it stands as the middle movement between two movements I might best describe as "colossal" -- Beethoven at his "E-flat major"-est. There are keys that are known to be hospitable to string instruments, and there are keys known to be hospitable to wind instruments, among which perhaps none is more so than E-flat major, which always lends itself to full-throated musical celebration.
IS THERE ANY MORE FULL-THROATEDLY E-FLAT-MAJOR-ISH
MUSIC THAN THE OUTER MOVEMENTS OF THIS CONCERTO?
They go like this:
i. Allegro
iii. Rondo: Allegro
Anton Kuerti, piano; Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Davis, cond. CBC Enterprises, recorded c1985
Performance note: As the idea for this post was expanding into unmanageability, one scheme I was cooking up was one or another sort of elaborate presentation of these two movements. However, since we've already got some complete-concerto clips ready to go, I decided to settle on just one performance, from a recorded cycle of the complete Beethoven piano concertos (plus the Choral Fantasy) that's never gotten the attention I thought it deserves, one I've always had a conspicuous fondness for. Anton Kuerti may not be the supervirtuoso one instinctively thinks of in connection with the Emperor Concerto, but he has always been a reliably interesting as well as deeply musical pianist, and while Andrew Davis is heard here when he was solidly established but not yet an international big-timer in both the opera and the concert worlds, I'm reminded in this Beethoven concerto cycle of how much soul-satisfaction I got early on from his performances of all kinds of repertory.
BETWEEN THESE SUPER-MOVEMENTS, A SOULFUL ADAGIO
UN POCO MOSSO MIGHT RECEDE INTO THE BACKGROUND
As I noted when we first heard this movement, it's in the key of B major, which: (1) is about as remote from E-flat major as you can get, and (2) with its five sharps isn't particularly friendly either to wind or string instruments, and can lend itself to a certain muted quality. Which seems to me very much what Beethoven had in mind when he conceived this deeply introspective movement.
We're going to listen again to the first three performances of it we heard, only this time amplified by some related ones.
• First off, among those three "original" performances we heard two conducted by George Szell and two featuring Emil Gilels as soloist, and it happens that Szell made an earlier recording of the Emperor, with the British pianist Clifford Curzon, with whom he would later make once of the more famous of all piano-concerto recordings: a stormy, intense Brahms D minor with the London Symphony for Decca.
• Emil Gilels too made other recordings of the Emperor, and while I don't have the one he made in Leningrad with Kurt Sanderling on CD, I do have a performance he did with Sanderling a bit closer to home than the London and Cleveland recordings we've heard: from a Prague Beethoven concerto cycle.
• Finally, Clifford Curzon himself rerecorded the Emperor, with a very different conductor from Szell, Hans Knappertsbusch.
The combinations don't always work out the way we might imagine. ("Suave" isn't a word I often think of to describe Szell performances, but it occurred to me for this Curzon-Szell collaboration.) I think it's fun to hear them side by side by side.
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat, Op. 73
(Emperor): ii. Adagio un poco mosso
Clifford Curzon, piano; London Philharmonic Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Decca, recorded September 1949 (transfer by F. Reeder)
Clifford Curzon, piano; Vienna Philharmonic, Hans Knappertsbusch, cond. Decca, recorded June 1957
Leon Fleisher, piano; Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Epic-CBS-Sony, recorded Mar. 3-4, 1961
Emil Gilels, piano; Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. EMI, recorded Mar.-Apr. 1968
Emil Gilels, piano; Philharmonia Orchestra, Leopold Ludwig, cond. EMI, recorded Apr. 30-May 1, 1957
Emil Gilels, piano; Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Kurt Sanderling, cond. Multisonic, recorded live, Nov. 21, 1958
AS FOR OUR OTHER BEETHOVEN CONCERTO --
When we think of "Middle Period" Beethoven's glimpses into the sublime, I don't think it would take many music lovers long to think of the Violin Concerto. Like the Adagio un poco mosso of the Emperor Concerto, the Larghetto of the Violin Concerto follows an opening Allegro of enormous stature, but not one of the possibly overpoweringly grand character of the opening movement of the Emperor. And the Violin Concerto's scamperingly light-hearted concluding Rondo similarly leaves unadulterated the almost-otherworldly beauty of the Larghetto. Worth hearing again, I think.
BEETHOVEN: Violin Concerto in D, Op. 61:
ii. Larghetto
Zino Francescatti, violin; Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Bruno Walter, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded Jan. 23 and 26, 1961
David Oistrakh, violin; Berlin Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra, Hermann Abendroth, cond. Live performance in the Staatsoper Berlin, Mar. 31, 1952
David Oistrakh, violin; RAI Alessandro Scarlatti Orchestra of Naples, Herbert Alpert, cond. Melodram, recorded live, Apr. 15, 1965
Performance notes: If any explanation is needed for inclusion of the Francescatti-Walter performance, can we just chalk it up to "sheer unpretentious timeless beauty"? As for the great David Oistrakh (1908-1974), who combined about as much technical mastery and depth of soul as can be crammed into one human body-and-mind, he made a pile of recordings of the Beethoven Concerto, all over the musical world, and there's another pile of live performances that have circulated. Here, from a time when it was almost unheard of for Soviet musicians to be allowed to travel outside the Eastern bloc, we hear first an earlyish East German broadcast performance (though not that early; he was 43), and from a later era, by which time Oistrakh in the flesh had become a treasured guest in the West, an Italian broadcast performance.
ONE CURIOUS WRINKLE: IS IT A VIOLIN CONCERTO?
IS IT A PIANO CONCERTO? IT'S BOTH, AND NEITHER
As most music lovers know, Beethoven himself made an adaptation of the Violin Concerto for piano. He filled out the solo part to give the pianist enough to do, so it's no longer a violin concerto, but it isn't really a piano concerto either (though he did outfit it with clearly pianistic cadenzas). I don't know that we're going to have a more suitable occasion to listen to a bit of this strange hybrid.
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto in D, Op. 61 (arr. from the Violin Concerto by the composer): ii. Larghetto
Peter Serkin, piano; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, cond. RCA, recorded June 9-13, 1969
APPENDIX 1: THE COMPLETE EMPEROR CONCERTO
I've made a big deal out of the position of these two great slow movements in their respective concertos, so it seems only sensible that we hear them in their entirety. These are performances I found at Internet Archive:
BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat, Op. 73 (Emperor):
i. Allegro
ii. Adagio un poco mosso
iii. Rondo: Allegro
[ii. at 19:53; iii. at 27:57] Clifford Curzon, piano; London Philharmonic Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Decca, recorded September 1949 (transfer by F. Reeder)
Wilhelm Kempff, piano; Berlin Philharmonic, Paul van Kempen, cond. DG, recorded 1953
Wilhelm Backhaus, piano; Vienna Philharmonic, Hans Schmidt-Issertedt, cond. Decca, recorded 1959
Maurizio Pollini, piano; Vienna Philharmonic, Karl Böhm, cond. DG, recorded 1979
APPENDIX 2: THE COMPLETE VIOLIN CONCERTO --
Online I found renderings of the Huberman-Szell, 1953 Menuhin-Furtwängler, and Oistrakh-Cluytens recordings, and added to them the complete Oistrakh-Alpert from which we just heard the Larghetto.
BEETHOVEN: Violin Concerto in D, Op. 61:
i. Allegro ma non troppo
ii. Larghetto
iii. Rondo: Allegro
Bronislaw Huberman, violin; Vienna Philharmonic, George Szell, cond. EMI, recorded June 19-20, 1934 (transfer by F. Reeder)
Yehudi Menuhin, violin; Philharmonia Orchestra, Wilhelm Furtwängler, cond. EMI, recorded 1953
David Oistrakh, violin; French National Radio Orchestra, André Cluytens, cond. EMI, recorded 1969
David Oistrakh, violin; RAI Alessandro Scarlatti Orchestra of Naples, Herbert Alpert, cond. Melodram, recorded live, Apr. 15, 1965
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