I must confess to having had a strange experience with this record. Being in a historicizing mood, I decided to play the earlier concerto – the B flat – first. It was quite a shock. Indeed, at the end of the ritornello, I took it off, unable to believe that Sanderling (Emil Gilels’s alert and sympathetic accompanist on a very collectable late-1950s Leningrad cycle of the concertos) could contemplate playing this dashingly youthful music in quite so self-conscious and measured a way. I later discovered that he was merely doing his job, since what Mitsuko Uchida does is provide just about as rapt, retiring and beguilingly sostenuto an account of the solo part as you are ever likely to hear.
Alas, Uchida’s performance beautifies not only the first movement but the finale as well. The solo piano playing is ravishing, but there is little sense of comedy: the piano responding skittishly to the strings’ solemn remonstrances, the violins getting the giggles, and the woodwind finally throwing in the towel and waltzing off with the piano. Comedy, generally, is at a premium in these performances; the wind-playing in both finales is pretty humourless. Nor are matters helped by the fact that the rather too reverberant Herkulessaal recording obscures the bassoon.
It is true that even as a young man Beethoven was a poet of the keyboard, but I am not sure that the solo part should be quite so much the gentle flame burning quietly beneath its bushel. Pianists such as Solomon, Kempff and Gilels understood how ‘fine’ Beethoven’s piano writing is, but their recordings catch more of the music’s bravura, racy side.
The performance of the B flat Concerto is worth hearing for the sheer beauty of Uchida’s playing, though I am surprised the recording team was willing to accept a take of the recitative at the end of the slow movement (one of the most ravishing things in all Beethoven) with so much random studio noise in the background. Older collectors may recall that at this point on Serkin’s wonderful 1950s mono recording with Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra (Philips, 10/57), the faint sound of a motor-horn is heard in the distance. Curiously, that comes over as a charming aberration; here, the shuffles are merely irritating.
In the C major Concerto, Sanderling’s conducting of the ritornello is less mannered, but it is still very slow (the marking is Allegro con brio, for which Czerny recommended a brisk metronome = 176). There is strength to the reading but it is also rather dull – altogether less live and enquiring than Rattle’s conducting on the very successful Lars Vogt recording. Uchida is potentially the more interesting of the two pianists, but her playing in the C major Concerto is less involving than it is in the B flat. She makes relatively little, imaginatively speaking, of the concerto’s extraordinary first-movement development; and again there is a lack of humour in the playing, both in the finale, which lacks wit and devilment, and in the long first-movement cadenza which never really takes fire.
On an earlier Uchida/Sanderling release with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Philips, 5/96), I found the performance of the Fourth Piano Concerto preferable to that of the Third. Here it is the Second that takes precedence over the First, but this is a generally less successful disc, the various constituent elements never really knitting together as they do on rival recordings by Kempff, Kovacevich, Perahia or Vogt.'