Wilhelm Kempff (piano)
Berlin Philharmonic
Paul van Kempen (conductor)
Leon Fleisher (piano)
Cleveland Orchestra
George Szell (conductor)
1.ÌýAllegro moderato
2.ÌýAndante con moto –
3.ÌýRondo: Vivace
Many of the compositions of Beethoven’s so-called middle period are famously dominated by the notion of heroic struggle, spawning the popular image of the fist-shaking, furrow-browed Titan. But that is far from the whole picture. And in other works, among them the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, the Violin Concerto and the Fourth Piano Concerto, the expanded range and scale of Beethoven’s symphonic thinking go hand in hand with an unprecedented lyric breadth. In particular, the opening movements of all three works – all, significantly, marked Allegro moderato or Allegro ma non troppo – have a sense of serene spaciousness, with moments of profound reflective stillness, that is in its way no less revolutionary and prophetic than the mighty strivings of the ‘Eroica’ and Fifth symphonies.
A sketch for the opening bars of the G major concerto dates from 1804, and one jettisoned early sketch for the Rondo finale subsequently became the accompaniment to the Act 1 ‘Prisoners’ Chorus’ in his opera Fidelio. But Beethoven only turned to the concerto in earnest during 1806, when the Fifth Symphony was also on the stocks; and it is surely no accident that the first movements of each work view the same four-note figure from a drastically different perspective. Tradition has it that Beethoven performed the G major concerto at a private concert in Prince Lobkowitz’s palace in Vienna in March 1807, though the evidence is far from watertight. But we do know that the composer played it in the celebrated gargantuan concert he held in the city’s Theater an der Wien on 22 December 1808 that also included the first performances of the ‘Pastoral’ and Fifth symphonies, parts of the Mass in C and, as a bonne bouche, the hastily written Choral Fantasy.
The most famous thing about this concerto is its opening: an exquisitely gentle, questioning theme for the soloist, richly scored in the keyboard’s resonant middle register. No previous classical concerto had announced itself with the soloist alone; and none had begun so poetically and speculatively. The orchestra then responds, as if entranced, in a distant, luminous B major, before softly re-establishing the home key. This immediately establishes the movement’s predominant tone of confiding tenderness and prefigures its extraordinarily wide modulatory range (the development reaches as far as C sharp minor, the antipode of G major). Time and again the piano, through reflective understatement, challenges and deflects the orchestra’s propensity to assertive action. And one of the movement’s characteristic features is the way that prepared climaxes dissolve into lyrical meditation. At the end of the exposition, for instance, a long trill leads us to expect a rousing orchestral tutti. But this is deferred by a magical passage where the soloist muses on a cadential theme first heard in the orchestral introduction. The fortissimo re-interpretation of the main theme at the start of the recapitulation – the logical climax and resolution of the harmonically far-reaching development – is a typical Beethoven ploy. Yet even here the apparent note of triumph quickly yields to ethereal reflection.
The piano also prevails through gentle persuasion, albeit much more theatrically, in the central Andante con moto. It was Beethoven’s 19th-century biographer A. B. Marx who first compared this movement to Orpheus’ taming of the Furies. Yet, unlike many fanciful programmatic interpretations, this one is remarkably true to the content of the music. The movement can also be seen as the confrontation of two musical worlds: Baroque sternness and rigour in the strings’ brusque unisons, Romantic pathos in the keyboard’s soft harmonised responses. Gradually, the orchestra is appeased by the soloist’s increasingly eloquent pleas; and, after an impassioned cadenza-like climax, its harsh dotted rhythms are reduced to a ghostly whisper in the bass.
After the sustained E minor of the Andante, the quiet, faintly military theme of the Rondo, which follows without a break, re-establishes G major via several bars of C major (shades here of Haydn’s witty off-key beginnings); this has the knock-on effect of turning the tonic chord, G, into the dominant each time the Rondo theme returns. For all its swagger and playfulness, this movement shares with the opening Allegro moderato both its elaborate symphonic development and its core of rich, tranquil lyricism: in the dolce second theme, announced by the soloist in two widely-spaced contrapuntal lines and expanded by the orchestra in flowing polyphony; and in the beautiful transformation of the main theme towards the end of the movement, first on divided violas (in a remote, dream-like E flat), then, after the cadenza, in canon and, at last, unequivocally in the home key of G major.
Richard Wigmore © Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú
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