Leonard Bernstein didn't live to complete this cycle of the Beethoven piano concertos with Krystian Zimerman. It might have been prudent in the circumstances to leave the cycle as a noble torso—Concertos Nos. 3 to 5 on two separately available CDs—or even, perhaps, draft in another conductor. In the event, Zimerman himself directs the early C major and B flat Concertos which become rather characterless when the by-play of soloist and orchestra is channelled through a single authority. (Compare this to, say, Klemperer and the young Barenboim on EMI.)
Equally, the decision tends to throw into high relief the broad limitations of Zimerman's Beethoven playing. In the early concertos, even more than in the three later concertos, Zimerman the protagonist exercises a curiously intermittent control over the music. At times throughout the cycle—much of the Emperor, odd sforzando chords in earlier works—the playing can seem iron-clad. Yet there is little sense of consistently probing and rigorous intellect at work as there is with Serkin on Telarc. Equally, despite passages during these live recordings when the playing can seem settled and even at times quite beautiful, it is rarely that true Beethovenian songfulness we have from Kempff (DG) or Perahia (CBS). Nor, indeed, does Zimerman have anything of Kempff's or Perahia's inventive and quick-witted way with trills and ornamentation.
Zimerman seems most at home in the monumental and heroic account of the Emperor Concerto that Bernstein maps out for him. The Third, a difficult work to bring off, is generally unexceptionable. But in much of the Fourth Concerto there is too great a distance between Zimerman's imaginative plainness and the potentially much more romantic vision of Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic.
The best of the recordings technically is that of the Emperor Concerto, even though some collectors will be alarmed by arpeggios that give the impression of a keyboard that extends across the entire width of the Great Hall of the Musikverein. Elsewhere the recordings tend to come and go both in tone quality and in immediacy. For instance, there is more brilliance to the piano tone in the cadenza of the first movement of the Third Concerto than there is in the coda that immediately follows it.'