Beethoven: Piano Concertos 1 2 3 4 5 Blu-ray delivers stunning video and reference-quality audio in this exceptional Blu-ray release
A universally admired interpreter of Beethoven’s music, Daniel Barenboim is both pianist and conductor in these celebrated performances of the composer’s five piano concertos. And it is to the Klavier-Festival Ruhr that Barenboim has entrusted the honor of being allowed to make what is as yet his only video recording of this pianistic cosmos. The orchestra is one of the oldest ensembles in the world, the venerable Staatskapelle Berlin.
It's perhaps a little ironic that Beethoven made his initial claim to fame as a pianist, and yet few people can hum anything from his piano concertos with the same ease they can mimic phrases from any of his nine symphonies. Beethoven's protean talents at the keyboard made him a legend in his relative youth, where in a sort of "dueling keyboard" format he would figuratively knock off the competition, long before the glories of his orchestral writing had become well known. Though classical music aficionados can point to any number of great Beethoven piano compositions, whether for solo keyboard or with orchestra, the fact is that these pieces are generally less well known than some of the rest of his oeuvre. Daniel Barenboim has a long history with the five Beethoven piano concertos. Decades ago he was Arthur Rubenstein's hand picked conductor for that vaunted pianist's only recording of the concerti. But as a pianist himself, Barenboim has long been one of the most temperamentally well suited artists to attack these five very different pieces. Barenboim brings both the classical clarity of thought, combined with a proclivity for the passionate eruptions for which Beethoven is so justly famous, giving the listener both balance and tempestuousness in equal measure.
While Beethoven probably actually wrote at least seven piano concertos in his long compositional career, there are really only five which have been made part of the "authoritative" Beethoven catalog. Even these five have at least a bit of mystery attached to their writing and publication, with their ultimate numbering not necessarily going hand in hand with their actual chronology, compositionally speaking. What is most fascinating to many listeners, however, is the absolutely incredible range of ideas Beethoven brings to these five pieces, from the quasi-Mozartian First Piano Concerto in C, to the decidedly more futuristic and chromatically aware "Emperor" Concerto, Beethoven's late in life fifth essay in the form. While each of these concertos follows the standard three movement sonata form of the day, they are each individually remarkably disparate pieces examining a wealth of different harmonic and rhythmic ideas.
Daniel Barenboim is both conductor and pianist in these performances.
Barenboim, one of the more politically vocal artists on the world scene, brings a lifetime of expertise to this Beethoven cycle. In fact, his longtime mentor Wilhem Fürtwangler wanted the then young Barenboim to perform the First Piano Concerto in Berlin shortly after the end of WWII, but Barenboim's father refused to let his child go to the heart of the Holocaust. Later, of course, Barenboim famously recorded the series under the baton of Otto Klemperer and, later, did his own conducting duties with, perhaps ironically, the Berlin Philharmonic.
While it's perhaps not that unusual to have a soloist also conduct, it frankly seems somehow more typical for that soloist to be, say, a violinist leading a smaller group, like Gil Shaham does with the Orpheus Ensemble. It may therefore come as something of a visual surprise to see Barenboim at the grand piano, which is placed front and center before the Staatskapelle Berlin (so that Barenboim's back is toward the audience), standing behind the keyboard to direct the orchestra, and then quickly sitting down for his soli. I'm not sure if that's one of the reasons Barenboim perspires so heavily in some of these performances, but I'm sure the stress of both leading an orchestra and maintaining the artistic focus of a soloist must be overwhelming. Regardless of how daunting a task this double duty must be, Barenboim brings an unerring firmness to the conductor's duties and aside from a very few missteps at the keyboard (which I attribute to sheer exhaustion), brings his formidable pianistic brilliance to the solo work.
What becomes apparent in listening to this quintet one after the other is that while Beethoven may have been toeing the line more or less in his early compositional career, he could still be subtly anarchistic, as in his choice for the relatively distant key of Ab major for the second movement of the first concerto. If the Second Concerto's formal aspects are a bit more in keeping with the traditions of the day, the then-radical chromaticism of the solo sections points to Beethoven's ever widening understanding of what various harmonies might imply. An unusual trip through a minor key (C minor) highlights Beethoven's Third Concerto, a piece whose supposed dourness is offset by a certain playfulness that may foreshadow a similarly themed masterpiece which visits minor key modalities, Mahler's First Symphony. Beethoven chooses to play a little fast and loose with concerto form in the Fourth Concerto, with a long introduction by solo piano before the orchestra begins playing. The Fourth's Rondo Vivace finale has become one of Beethoven's most lasting melodies, though few in the public at large know its source. Which brings us to the apex of Beethoven's Piano Concerto mountain, the undeniably magnificent "Emperor" Concerto (an appellation coined not by Beethoven but by the piece's English publisher). Beethoven begins stretching his harmonic palette almost to the breaking point in this wildly chromatic piece, which nonetheless remains rooted firmly in the diatonic tonal strictures of the day. It is an unusually visceral listening experience, as if we can hear Beethoven pounding his pianistic fists at the straitjackets of tonic, subdominant and dominant traditions.
Through these hugely disparate pieces, Barenboim maintains a certain detachment with regard to the orchestra, while simultaneously being completely at one with his own instrument. This is a man who can coax beautiful tenuti from a more or less banal phrase, and can likewise suddenly explode into quicksilver fury in some of Beethoven's daunting octave scalar moments. The Staatskapelle Berlin Orchestra, with whom Barenboim has a long, multi-decade history, performs admirably here, not especially thrown for a loop when Barenboim must, by necessity, stop ostensibly leading them in order to play the piano solos. These are beautiful performances from a man with a lifetime of experience in this repertoire, one who brings an uncommon understanding and more or less perfect artistic temperament to a composer who is alternately classically poised and then passionately almost out of control.
The Beethoven Piano Concertos arrive on Blu-ray with a 1080i/AVC encode that is decently sharp if not mind bogglingly so. In filmed concerts such as this there simply isn't the source image material to provide something of reference quality. What is here is clear and crisp, and provides some astounding level of detail in close ups especially. As you'll see in some of these screen captures, the viewer can literally count the unkempt hairs atop Barenboim's head and, for better or worse, clearly see the beads of perspiration as they drip down his face throughout several of the performances. Television direction is very strong throughout this piece, with excellent coverage of various instruments playing, and so the viewer is treated to wonderful up close and personal looks at bassoons, clarinets, and horns. Colors are excellent and decently saturated, and despite this being an interlaced video, few if any artifacts rear their ugly heads.
Luckily the audio on this Blu-ray is near reference quality, with a sterling DTS HD-MA 5.1 mix that is robust and wonderfully warm. Everything about this soundtrack is deeply burnished, and the piano tones especially are pearly and beautifully rounded, with none of the brittle high end that sometimes accompanies keyboard recordings. Surround channels are well utilized for the orchestral sections, making the call and answer formula of many of these concertos a joy to listen to. Barenboim's piano is, as it should be, front and center in the sound field, wit the rest of the orchestra directionally placed according to their stage location. There's excellent fidelity throughout all frequencies, with a surprisingly strong low end, especially when Barenboim thunders through some of the bass clef fireworks in the piano part. Similarly, though, the middle and high registers are full and mellow sounding. The PCM 2.0 folddown offers excellent clarity, if an obviously narrower hall ambience and more crowded feel to the orchestral passages.
There's probably no finer interpreter of Beethoven's piano oeuvre currently working than Barenboim, and these wonderfully vibrant performances find the artist in peak form, from both a pianistic and conducting standpoint.
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