Artur Schnabel - Schnabel Plays The Beethoven Piano Concertos (1993) [3CD]

The realm of “early” Beethoven is now a familiar and often performed phrase of the composer's development. Before the advent of Artur Schnabel, a pioneer who presented with regularity the composer in all his ‘periods’, this stage lay dormant and virtually unexplored until its inclusion by the few pianists Who ventured to perform all thirty-two sonatas in public. Egon Petri and Walter Gieseking played the entire group as a cycle in their youth, yet it is Schnabel who is considered as the first to do so. Hans von Bülow's edition was the first to cover all the works thoroughly, and certain elements of his probing and at times severe approach have found their way into the recordings made by his pupil Frederic Lamond, whose own edition of Beethoven's Thirty-Two sonatas has footnotes replete with specific details of Bülow's handling of ornaments in performance. Both are historically valuable close-up views of the way music was studied and understood in the nineteenth century. Schnabel, well-acquainted with their editions, envisioned his own as a step beyond their archaisms and inaccuracies while serving as a forum of his ideas. Lamond, also a Liszt pupil, resided in Berlin for the first three decades of our century and became identified as the eminent Beethoven performer who was succeeded only by Schnabel. Such acclaim might seem hard to fathom while listening to Lamond's many Beethoven recordings, although they were made in late life, beginning in the mid-1920s after an accident reputedly cramped his technique. Mechanism aside, what remains puzzling in Lamond's Beethoven is how his projection of a line gets diverted by sudden accellerations in tempo, heavy accents and changes in touch, creating an uneasiness that often reduces his attempt to project the grandeur and architecture to becoming an unwelcome focus on details which often clouds their sudden newly- gained prominence. Perhaps Lamond's way is a reduced version of Bülow's reputed authoritative dryness sprinkled with such gestures of ‘expressivity’. One trustwoithy view of Bülow comes from the astute Robert Freund (Liszt pupil, friend of Brahms and brother of Etelka Freund) who heard a Bülow concert in Winterthur in 1885 and recalled in a private memoir how “he was in excellent form and played with some absolute perfection”...
Allan Evans (booklet)


Tracks:

Cd. 1
Piano Concerto n° 1 in C Major, Op. 15
1 I. Allegro con brio 16:57
2 II. Largo 12:30
3 III. Rondo. Allegro scherzando 8:43

4 Bagatelle in A Minor, WoO 59 'Für Elise' 3:05

Piano Concerto n° 2 in B-Flat Major, Op. 19*
5 I. Allegro con brio 13:29
6 II. Adagio 9:15
7 III. Rondo. Molto allegro 5:39

8 Bagatelle, Op. 126 n° 4 in B Minor. Presto 3:41


Cd. 2
Piano Concerto n° 3 in C Minor, Op. 37
1 I. Allegro con brio 15:05
2 II. Largo 10:45
3 III. Rondo. Allegro 8:01

4 Rondo in C Major, Op. 51, n° 1 4:45

Piano Concerto n° 4 in G Major, Op. 58
4 I. Allegro moderato 17:33
5 II. Andante con moto 4:50
6 III. Rondo. Vivace 9:08


Cd. 3
Piano Concerto n° 5 in E-Flat Major, Op. 73
"Emperor"
1 I. Allegro 19:09
2 II. Adagio un poco mosso 8:11
3 III. Rondo. Allegro 9:19

Piano Concerto n° 4 in G Major, Op. 58
4 I. Allegro moderato 18:56
5 II. Andante con moto 5:02
6 III. Rondo. Vivace 9:28

Personnel:

Artur Schnabel - p
London Philharmonic Orchestra or London Symphony Orchestra*/Malcolm Sargent - dir. [# Cd. 1, 2 & 3, # 1-3]
Columbus Philharmonic Orchestra/Izler Solomon - dir. [Cd. 3, # 5-6]