On Music
GOODMAN, JOHN
ON MUSIC By John Goodman Gilels' Integral Beethoven Owning integral recorded sets of works like Beethoven's symphonies or piano concertos is still considered declasse in some quarters. To...
...The antithetical intentions of the two pianists are less obvious in their "Emperor" recordings...
...Of these qualities Gilels chooses to stress the former, Fleisher the latter...
...A critic like Goldsmith gets so bogged down in the minutiae of comparisons that he is unable or unwilling to regard the concertos with any perspective other than that of the opinionated discographer...
...The "Emperor" is Beethoven's grandest public gesture with the concerto, employing more oratorical drama than ever before and commencing the movement of 19th-century orchestral music from the inhibiting salon to the large, concert hall...
...The great virtue of the Gilels/Szell treatment is that they offer fresh perspectives on the Beethoven tradition as a whole, and on the concertos in particular, from a peculiarly contemporary point of view...
...In a word, the sound here is far better than most live performances, or recordings of them, provide...
...He does so at a considerable loss...
...While Schnabel (available on Angel GRE-4006) and, to an extent, Fleisher tend to lose themselves in the ardor of the music, we are always aware of Gilels' presence as a shaper of the musical phrase...
...Their approach, with its stress on technical perfection, detail and sensitive control, is not only a reflection of recent trends in the history of musical performance, but of modern recording conditions...
...In these days of packaged promotion, it is to Columbia's great credit that it saw fit to release its orchestra and allow the project to go forward...
...Szell, miraculously, is equally at home with both approaches, even if he seems more vigorous and conscious of the orchestra's power to heighten the soloist's effects with Fleisher, and more relaxed and congenial with Gilels...
...Equally important is the singular modern point of view, mentioned earlier, which this set reflects...
...It is Fleisher's rendition of this movement, however, that is without peer...
...in the 1957 version there is too much of the coldness of Rudolf Serkin...
...One value of an integral set, though, is that it allows us to determine the scope and depth of the performer's commitment to an interpretation...
...True, a purchase is chancy: Even a performer's most ardent admirer may not endorse the treatment of every selection...
...He develops a similar kind of contrast in the following Rondo, played with great drive and precision...
...Whatever other values they may have, the Gilels/Szell recordings are something of an innovation in the esthetic of Beethoven performance...
...The coloration is elegant, the detail crystalline...
...And in this case we can experience Beethoven's increasing mastery of the concerto, both as he develops the genre itself and as it relates to the larger corpus of his work...
...The sound heard on the Gilels/Szell discs is emphatically not that of the concert hall...
...Indeed, Gilels has come a long way from his earlier 1957 recordings with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Leopold Ludwig conducting (Angel S35511 andS35476), as the new set clearly demonstrates...
...The only other set of Beethoven's piano concertos of comparable excellence is the one by Leon Fleish-er, also with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, on Epic (4 discs, BSC 151...
...The road was laid out for him by Artur Schnabel, with whom he studied during his years as one of the most famous concert-hall prodigies this country has produced...
...Gilels' earlier playing is excessively forceful and impetuous, especially in the cadenza...
...Gilels and Szell appear to be very conscious of having performed for a recording...
...I myself was struck by one further innovation...
...The instrumentation sounds a bit different in each set...
...John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhaus-en, and the other aleatory and electronic composers seem finally to have taught the performers of standard repertoire to discover the substance and excitement of sound as sound...
...The music calls out for this, but performers do not always provide it...
...the balance and blend between soloist and ensemble is carefully established...
...Even the critics have caught a glimmer of this: Igor Kipnis says in December Stereo Review, "I myself was so constantly struck by the beautiful sounds the man was making...
...Already several are carping at the magnificent new collaboration of Emil Gilels and George Szell with the Cleveland Orchestra on the Beethoven Piano Concertos (Angel, 5 discs, SE-3731...
...This Schwann Catalog approach is impressive to the record buyer, who trembles before the number of versions available yet is intimidated by the idea of an integral set...
...This Rondo consists of a grand rush of music: Beethoven uses all the resources of the piano and the orchestra with luminosity and passion...
...with Szell, Gilels opts for Beethoven's alternate cadenza, seldom heard, and here brilliantly performed...
...Ever since their appearance in 1961 these performances have been lavishly and rightfully praised as milestones on the road to an ideal Beethoven concept, a kind of Platonic musical truth—what Fleisher himself calls "that far off, unattainable light...
...If Fleisher, the Platonist, looks to structure and depth, Gilels is the Aristotelian, attending to matters of form, texture, and meticulous execution...
...The Fourth Concerto, Beethoven's greatest, is restrained yet unconventional in its conception...
...The sonic texture is its own reward, not just a means to deeper, more "spiritual" values...
...The power and drama of the last two concertos are not ignored...
...His performance, dynamic and fervent, is counterbalanced with an intellectual sternness that is wholly appropriate...
...such variables as reverberation and instrumental placement are vigorously controlled...
...Gilels plays the standard first movement cadenza with very clear articulation, and in the great Largo movement stresses rhythmic detail and ornamental refinement, perhaps at the expense of breadth and elegiac feeling...
...To sanction one man's interpretation to the extent of buying all of it, in a fancy box with elegant notes and, sometimes, scores, is no less frowned upon than displaying Richmond Lattimore's slip-cased translations of Greek tragedy...
...The first movement opens uniquely with solo statement by the piano of the principal theme, and proceeds with an involved symphonic development in which the orchestra naturally takes the leading role...
...Fleisher exphasizes more of the sweep and design of the music...
...Although Beethoven's originality is evident, as in the final Rondo of the C Major, these are still genre pieces...
...This is Beethoven played on the grand scale—with wit and passion...
...With more collaboration of this kind, buyers may have fewer misgivings about other packages—like boxed sets at come-on prices...
...The recording sessions, as described in Roland Gel-lat's notes, involved elaborate arrangements and long months of contractual negotiations by emi/Angel, since the Cleveland Orchestra records exclusively for Columbia...
...The critics are no help...
...The Third Concerto has been called a preliminary essay for the "Eroica" Symphony, but its concluding Rondo is full of Mozartian devices and effects—for example, the rhythmic shift and key change after the brief cadenza—and Gilels and Szell make the most of these...
...These interpretations will hardly please everybody, but their historical significance is undeniable...
...Contrary to the prevailing largescale readings, Gilels and Szell play the first two concertos (C Major and B-Flat Major) to emphasize the delicacy of this music and its continual echoes of indebtedness to Haydn and Mozart...
...For none of them does he prefer Gilels and Szell, whose performances he usually discounts with a single pejorative adjective...
...In last November's High Fidelity, Harris Goldsmith once again indulges himself with synoptic snippets of commentary on a great many of the available recordings of the five concertos...
...In the very moving, brief dialogue that constitutes the second movement, the later Gilels sounds very much like Artur Rubinstein?abstract but with feeling...
...The Russian's total control of the piano is full of sensitivity, nuance, and effortless ease, and is in no way mechanical...
...Once tape splicing and sonic doctoring became standard and high quality sound became commonplace, it was only a matter of time until the ideals of the recording studio and the concert hall diverged...
...certainly the Gilels version is more closely miked...
...Gilels and Szell, on the other hand, take things a bit more calmly...
...It is Gilels' particular accomplishment in these recordings to project a sense of this progress by clearly differentiating concerto styles...
...The Gilels set displays better than any other Beethoven's progression through the concerto genre from its earlier Classical form to the full, singular mastery of the G Major and E-Flat Major ("Emperor") works...
...Gilels exerts sturdy power and flexible control, a sense of ease and improvisatory phrasing evident from the first bars of the introduction, where the piano "fills" between three simple orchestral chords...
...In the older Philharmonia recording, Ludwig provided an accompaniment far more orthodox and less subtle than Szell and the Cleveland offer...
...Schnabel developed the spirited, tough-minded, probing-in-depth approach to the composer...
...Goldsmith's magisterial tone and announced preference for the Schnabel school of Beethoven interpretation leave the buyer secure that he can rely on the critic's taste and safely ignore Gilels...
...The microphone perspective is different...
...So is the Third (C Minor), despite the fact that Beethoven's assurances and vigor are developing here in transition to the dramatic, virtuoso style of the two final works...
Vol. 52 • February 1969 • No. 2
