Customer Reviews

Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 & 2

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Melvyn Tan has a light, spritely style of piano playing- which is not always a good thing. For period performances of Beethoven's first two piano concertos, Tan isn't a bad way to go, but for the rest I would most highly recommend Robert Levin with John Eliot Gardiner. While the other big contender here, Jos van Immerseel, tends to overemphasize the drama of Beethoven, Tan seems to completely ignore it. Fortunately there's not a lot of it in these works, and the energy of Tan and Norrington's London Classical Players is lively indeed (tempos are quite fast).

The other problem with these performers is that the recordings tend to be distant and muddy. Unfortunate indeed, as the clarity of Levin/Gardiner makes for a much more enjoyable listen. It's hard to beat the price of this CD though, and you can't go totally wrong with it.

After his epoque-making series of Beethoven symphonies on period instruments, Sir Roger Norrington turned in 1988 to Beethoven's piano concertos, which he recorded, again in London's Abbey Road studios, with the Singaporean harpsichordist and fortepiano expert Melvyn Tan playing a copy of a Nannette Streicher fortepiano from 1814. As with the symphonies, Norrington follows the metronome markings by Czerny very closely, yielding some excitingly fast tempi in the outer movements and some dreamy slow movements. Melvyn Tan plays lightly to the point of delicacy, replacing high drama with virtuosity and not a little humour in Beethoven's explosive rondos. What he does not quite achieve is to get his fortepiano 'singing' in the way the young Beethoven was famous for doing; if you want to hear that you should try to get hold of one of Jos van Immerseel's recordings of Beethoven's sonatas for violin and piano (BMG/Deutsche Harmonia Mundi).

The recordings are, in fact, very clear, but definitely an acquired taste: the fortepiano seems, for our spoiled modern ears, to be not nearly loud enough, and I suspect that EMI's engineers here resisted the temptation to alter the natural sound balance in favour of Tan, thus causing a good deal of irritation to listeners whose ears are attuned to a modern concert piano or to Cds whose sound has been manipulated. The orchestra is here as clean and as present as on the earlier Norrington Beethoven recordings.

I've got the Concerto No. 1 on another CD with Norrington's take on the First Symphony. My review here is just about Concerto No. 1, as I've not heard Norrington's No. 2.

Going with a Mozartian-sized orchestra, rather than something in at least the mid-40s on numbers, seems overly historically performed.

So does using a fortepiano from right around 1800, when Beethoven railed against pianos of his day all his life.

**TRUE** "HIP" conducting, while not reaching for a modern 9-foot Steinway, would at least have used an 1830s piano, if not somewhat later. Because that would have been the piano for which Beethoven himself longed, even lusted.

I'm all with HIP tempos, dimished vibrato, etc. I've got Gardiner's complete symphony cycle, and used to have Hogwood's. But, this just isn't right.