This is a decent, unexceptionable account of the Emperor, made interesting by the quality of the soloist, but not, perhaps, a version for high days and holidays. Emanuel Ax's contribution apart, it seems to me a piece of record making rather than the document of a performance, whereas the other three CDs listed offer a choice of considered statements about a great work. They burn steadily and a good deal more brightly. One can delight in the personality and individual qualities of the soloists, of course, but with them there is no question of isolating Pollini, Brendel or Arrau from the performance as a whole. Ax with Previn and the RPO is not really in that league. Here I find myself interested in what the pianist does but not so much in what goes on around him. Not that I expect the RPO to sound as magnificent as the Chicago Symphony or the Vienna Philharmonic but its achievement with Previn doesn't compel attention in the same way. And indeed the quality of the orchestral playing is sometimes disappointing. The soggy opening chord does not make a good start. The first tutti lacks freshness, urgency, definition of character: a general picture is conveyed but it is as if no one thought it worth offering more that a parade of the material before the soloist begins his own exposition. Ax too, in his flourishes at the very beginning, does not launch the Concerto—as Pollino and Brendel do—in a way that makes one eager to know what sort of a piece this is going to be after such an extraordinary upbeat. And it's a long time before the performance takes wing. Eventually, at the recapitulation, it does, and from there to the end of the movement it achieves a purpose and concentration I had begun to despair of finding.
Ax is a first-rate Beethoven player, technically splendid and with much to say about the Emperor, but he suffers from having to make almost all the running. His slow movement, the most flowing of the performances I've been listening to, becomes rather an amble because of the lack of intensity in the orchestral support; and his relaxed, colourful and at times almost scherzando treatment of the finale—where so many pianists blaze away nonstop—needs, I think, to be set off against sharper orchestral accompaniment and more vigorous contrasts.
On the other recordings the pianists may have had an easier task. There you sense a concerted effort to present a large and richly conceived symphonic structure. The personality and virtuosity of the soloist is an integral part of it, but neither soloist nor orchestra plays a subordinate role: the dialectical nature of their relationship is everything. Perhaps circumstances dictated that Ax should be cast here as the protagonist in a heroic virtuoso concerto. The Emperor is often played like this but my guess is that it's not the way Ax would really like to do it.
The balance is generally good, but coming to it directly after the oldest of the other versions (Pollini's on DG, which derives from an analogue recording) the piano sound strikes me as unimpressive. I have reservations about it in Brendel's Philips performance too, particularly in the finale, which comes from a cycle of the Beethoven concertos he gave in public concerts in Chicago's Orchestra Hall. A reminder, finally, that the Arrau is a document of a special kind, made for Philips after he had passed his 80th year. It needs few apologies on account of that, however, since the Emperor Concerto is a work he has long interpreted superbly well.'