The Third and Fourth Concertos round out what has been an impressive Beethoven cycle. Let’s start with the conducting. Vasily Petrenko continues to favour the kind of lean, transparent textures, rhythmic spring and crisply aligned ensemble work associated with Szell, Zinman and Dausgaard, along with Abbado in his latter-day Mahler Chamber Orchestra recordings. He’s happily got past his earlier tendency to pull back at climaxes and taper phrases, while the Royal Liverpool strings display more body and tonal heft in soft passages, even when vibrato is at a minimum.

One prominent example of this can be found in No 4’s Andante con moto, where the sempre staccato articulation conveys a stern urgency that can easily sound clipped and insensitive in the wrong hands. What a striking contrast to Boris Giltburg’s eloquently spun-out legato phrasing and expressive economy, not to mention his seeming reluctance to let go of that fermata on the penultimate F sharp. This touching gesture leads into a Rondo featuring scintillating runs up and down the keyboard and carefully layered contrapuntal interaction in the lyrical second theme (4'34" onwards). The first movement unfolds expansively, sustained by the performers’ patient and meticulous detailing; some listeners, however, may miss the poetic nuances heard in comparably paced interpretations such as Gilels/Ludwig and Arrau/Davis. Giltburg, incidentally, opts for the more familiar first-movement cadenza favoured by Arrau, Schnabel and Fleisher.

Bracing horizontal clarity and pinpoint accents throughout No 3’s first-movement ritornello suggest more alla breve forward motion than certain faster performances do. Giltburg enters with decisive upward scales that signify his attentive solo presence throughout. Students of the text will notice uncommon synchronicity between melodies and accompaniments, especially where left-hand triplet figurations are concerned. Giltburg builds his Largo introduction from the bottom up, with real weight and gravitas, while meaningfully inflecting the final pages’ decorative passages and cadenza. If the Rondo falls slightly short of the rabble-rousing soloist/ensemble interplay of Zimerman and Bernstein in Vienna, one nevertheless infers plenty of headlong brio, abetted by the bite of the Liverpool brass and impactful timpani. As usual, Giltburg’s erudite, informative and vividly expressed booklet notes brilliantly toe a line between the scholarly and the personal. There’s no question that Giltburg and Petrenko’s Beethoven cycle proudly holds its own next to superb recent versions such as Goodyear/Constantine (Orchid, 5/20) and Barnatan/Gilbert (Pentatone, 12/20), along with modern-day references from Berezovsky/Dausgaard (Simax, 2/06) and Bronfman/Zinman (12/05).