To fit Beethoven's five piano concertos and the Choral Fantasia on to three LPs with no turnovers within or between works is a considerable feat of layout and engineering, especially when the sound, though not of demonstration quality, is very acceptable and generally easy to reproduce. If the orchestra has, at times, more presence than the solo instrument this is perhaps more to do with the playing than the balance or the engineering.
As a Beethoven interpreter, Larrocha does not strike me as being in the first flight. She seems more at home in the slow movements, which are played with a cool grace that is not unappealing, than inthe taxing first movements or witty, improvisatory finales; here the playing is often very competent but there is a brittleness about the interpretations, and occasionally about the touch itself, which is complemented by a restlessness in both the pacing and the accentuation (try, for instance, the opening of the finale of the First Concerto) that will unsettle many collectors. In the longer paragraphs and movements—for instance, the first movement of the Fifth Concerto—there is no evidence that Beethoven's sophisticated punctuation has been completely understood.
Chailly provides prompt and sensible accompaniments (though the Berlin RSO might look to its wind tuning) but he seems to exercise no special spell over his soloist or she over him. There is none of the interactive chemistry we are familiar with from some earlier partnerships on record: Kempff and van Kempen, Gilels and Szell, Barenboim and Klemperer (on HMV), Brendel and Haitink (on Philips) or, most recently, Perahia and Haitink (CBS). Significantly, pianist and conductor do not seem to have thought the Choral Fantasia fully through; a troubled adolescent of a work, it desperately needs someone to take it in hand and tell it where it stands. (Klemperer was always magnificent here, a model of pedagogic rectitude and, like many of the best pedagogues, an ironist, too.) Similarly, a bizarre sense of fantasy is introduced into the Fourth Concerto by the use of cadenzas by Reinecke; their effete post-classical style, questionable at the best of times, sorts ill with a performance so strikingly matter-of-fact as this one.
Despite its economical layout, this new set cannot be preferred to either of the equivalent LP sets listed above.'