These home-grown Hungarian recordings of the five Beethoven piano concertos come from one of the heartlands of Hungary’s never less than vibrant musical culture, the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest. Concerto Budapest is the academy’s resident orchestra and both soloist and conductor have close associations with the academy as teachers and chamber musicians. The soloist, 47-year-old Dénes Várjon, made a handful of recordings for Naxos in the 1990s. Rather more recently a Schumann disc in which he partnered cellist Steven Isserlis was widely admired (Hyperion, 5/09).

Várjon is at his most plausible in Beethoven’s two early concertos and in the slow movements. I say plausible because it is never long before doubts begin to occur. There is crispness and dash aplenty in his playing of the B flat Second Concerto, albeit in too persistently staccato a manner. That evenness of touch and finely manicured finger staccato which we have from the very finest Beethovenians is too little apparent here. Equally there is a lack of pathos and expressive power in the high-lying semi- and demisemiquaver passages towards the close of the slow movement. Where with a Kempff or a Gilels the music is already echt-Beethovenian, here it sounds too much like Clementi on a good day. This is a deficiency, needless to say, which becomes chronic in the Fourth Concerto’s opening movement.

Both early finales get off to slightly rocky starts. In the B flat Concerto Várjon blurs the second bar of Beethoven’s brilliantly articulated game of musical hide-and-seek. Then in the solo dash which launches the finale of the C major First Concerto, Várjon’s left hand – a particularly strong and agile left hand – is over-intrusive. By giving undue prominence to what is merely an accompanying figure in bars 4-6, he subverts the bass’s witty and decisive four-note interjection in bar 8.

In the Third Concerto, an unusually aggressive reading of the first movement is followed by an exceptionally fine account of the slow movement. In the Fourth Concerto, after that disappointing opening movement, Várjon treats the finale as a kind of Mozartian jest. This works rather well. He is less successful, however, with the Promethean jests which help drive the Emperor Concerto’s epic finale.

Concerto Budapest are a medium-sized ensemble with vibrato-light strings in the modern style. Their playing is competent rather than first-rate, as are the Hungaraton recordings, which veer towards harshness, and have too many perceptible edits between solo and tutti passages.