Gilels's 1950s Beethoven concerto cycle with Vandernoot and Ludwig (Columbia—nla) has always been generally better liked than this later cycle with Szell, though when my old friend Jerrold Northrop Moore took Gilels's Melodiya set with Sanderling (nla) out of his cupboard a month or two ago I was bound to concede that it was in many ways even finer. The trouble with the later Cleveland cycle is a certain chilliness. It is not exactly that the readings have been put in a straitjacket; more that at certain points both the recording and the musicians' apparently unanimous purpose deprives the music of some of its capacity to expand and breathe.
The feeling is most marked at the beginning of each concerto and at its end and seems even more marked on CD. These were CBS recordings in origin and the first impression one has is of unpleasingly high levels of tape background and a bright, clean closely recorded orchestra alongside which the solo piano sounds relatively muted. By the time one reaches the piano's entry in the C minor Concerto there is already a temptation to go off and listen to something more congenial.
Yet there are long stretches where Gilels is at his finest, moments when one simply sets the score aside and listens. In the C minor Concerto this process begins in the first movement cadenza and coda and continues through a wonderfully inward account of the great Largo. It is a performance of almost Sibelian purity that suggests Beethoven the withdrawn and obsessed visionary gazing across the Rhine to the Seven Mountains and the night skies beyond, something he was much given to doing. The pause between this movement and the finale is too long, sadly so when Gilels and Szell relish the punning juxtaposition of keys, but the finale itself goes well with plenty of roguish and scintillating detailing. And yet when one turns to the G major Concerto the feeling of hardness returns, made the more irritating at times by the quality of the recording and the powerlessness of CD to do anything other than magnify the defects. So in the end it is a walk-over for the newer Perahia/Haitink version, another CBS recording, but thankfully a good deal subtler technically.'