What a fine cycle this has been, spirited and never less than innately musical. Easy on the pocket, too, lest anyone should have overlooked the fact. The coupling of the Triple Concerto with the Fourth Piano Concerto was a particular highlight (6/97). Now the cycle comes home in style with a fresh, festive and properly assertive account of the Emperor Concerto, coupled with a performance of the C major Concerto (an unusual pairing but a shrewd one) in which the earlier work reveals its own imperial ambitions.
Such faults as there are, are usually faults in the right direction. The finale of the C major Concerto is here very fast and fierce: quicker than Beethoven’s Rondo-Allegro, and not especially scherzando. What comes out is the aggressive, iconoclastic side of Beethoven’s personality. It is also a big-boned performance, deploying a substantial orchestra in a lively acoustic. This suits the Emperor but could be thought to give the earlier work a slightly bloated feel. If, in the final analysis, it does not, it is because the performance itself has an all-redeeming urgency and spontaneity about it.
In the end, what marks these performances out from their more run-of-the-mill rivals is the musicianly accord that exists between Michael Roll and his pianist-conductor Howard Shelley. The performance of the Emperor is strong and grammatical but it is no mere hammer-and-tongs affair; the visionary side of the work is caught in a host of fine shadings and quiet accommodations of rhythm and sound between piano and orchestra.
There is one such accommodation in the slow movement of the Emperor. It is fleeting and barely audible and I shall not say where it is since you must find it for yourself. What was it the poet Blake said about seeing a “World in a grain of sand”?'