Beethoven’s Five Piano Concertos, Reconsidered

Period performance is still very much in its experimental stage as applied to music written after the Baroque and early Classical eras. Period Beethoven, played on original or, more often, replica instruments of the composer’s time, in accordance with what we know of stylistic practices of that distant past, are only beginning to appear on recordings, while remaining rarities in the concert hall.

Thus, the first integral set of the five piano concertos by Beethoven on recordings is a noteworthy event. The performers are the American pianist-scholar Steven Lubin and the British conductor-scholar (and a keyboardist as well) Christopher Hogwood, who leads his Academy of Ancient Music (L’Oiseau-Lyre 421 408, three CDs).

That the project has been carefully considered is attested to not only by the vast amount of research that went into creating the most authentic editions possible, but also by the use of four different pianos.

And while the same instrument is utilized for the last two concertos, for the “Emperor,” it was, in Lubin’s words, “re-voiced . . . to brighten the treble, a change required by the high tessitura and the projection called for by the grand rhetoric of the outer movements.”

The piano was, after all, in a constant state of development and there was no standard, even for the instrument’s range, during the decade and a half which separates the first from the last of the concertos.

Important too is Hogwood’s use of a varying string complement, from 14 for the B-flat Concerto of 1795 to 44 for the E-flat (“Emperor”) of 1811.

What one hears throughout is playing of considerable refinement and intelligence. But the overriding impression gained during the listening is of the enormous expressive differences between modern and period Beethoven--vastly more pronounced than with Mozart.

Beethoven’s pianos, on the evidence of these recordings, were asked to express a good deal less than we demand of modern pianos and pianists. When one compares the fortepianos of the early 19th Century with the already very sophisticated orchestra with which they coexisted--and competed--it becomes obvious that much more of the burden of nuance fell on the orchestra of that time than is the case today.

And that is where the present set--with all due respect for its bravery and skill--disappoints. One gets the feeling that Lubin is getting all that can be gotten out of the piano(s), but that Hogwood is often content to accompany rather than take the expressive and sonic initiative which the skill of his players and the sheer force of their numbers would allow.

The joint effort is most successful in the G-major Concerto, since for much of its course Beethoven has solo and orchestra going their separate ways, most notably in the slow movement, where the two exist as nearly separate, occasionally colliding entities.

Still, it’s an important start and there is a good deal of pleasure and fascination to be gained from this pioneering set, on which numerous interpretive variations will undoubtedly be wrought by future performers.

There’s a different and perhaps less historically tenable kind of pleasure to be gained from performances by pianist Anthony Newman and the Philomusica Antiqua of London, under Stephen Simon, of Beethoven’s First Concerto (Newport Classics 60031, CD, with Beethoven’s “Choral” Fantasy) and the “Emperor” Concerto (Newport Classics 60027, CD, with the “Egmont” Overture).

These are boisterous readings, on louder, more clangorous--or so the recording makes them sound--pianos than Lubin’s. Instrumental balances, which seem reasonably natural on Oiseau-Lyre, decidedly favors the piano on Newport, sometimes, as in the opening of the “Emperor” finale making it sound for all the world like some electronic monster.

Where Lubin may frequently sound cautious, Newman plays with enormous brio, with Simon and his scrappy band slamming away with total lack of inhibition. Good, lively fun of a less sophisticated sort than the more considered Lubin-Hogwood readings.

The Singapore-born British pianist Melvyn Tan utilizes a replica of an 1814 instrument for his recital of three familiar Beethoven sonatas: “Les Adieux,” the “Waldstein” and the “Appassionata” (EMI/Angel 49330, CD).

Tan, a fiery and highly persuasive artist, plays outer movements broadly but with such a powerful sense of line that momentum is maintained, quite hair-raisingly so in the ‘Appassionata.’ He favors less clipped accentuation than Lubin, and a wide dynamic range, qualities which may have as much to do with the colorful, wide-ranging instrument as with the Tan’s interpretive proclivities.