I suspect there are many people who will want this new recording of Brahms's B flat Piano Concerto as a memento of the much acclaimed performance these artists gave last August Bank Holiday Monday as part of the 1991 season of Promenade Concerts. (The recording was made shortly afterwards in Berlin's Schauspielhaus.) At the Prom, the Berlin Philharmonic itself was very much centre-stage; and there can be little doubt that it is the orchestra—as ever, peerless in Brahms—that gives this recording its distinctive character. It provides exactly the right fully-fledged symphonic context for Brendel. It also inspires him to realize the solo part with a weightiness of tone and concentration of line that hasn't always been there to complement the natural clarity of his Brahms. Thus, though individual movement timings are virtually identical with those on Brendel's earlier 1973 Amsterdam version on Philips, the scale and musical reach of the performance is considerably extended, as, indeed, is the shrewdness of page after page of musical detailing.
Abbado, too, now takes a shrewder view of the music than he did in 1977 when he recorded the concerto with Pollini in Vienna for DG. No movement suffers more from bland conducting than the miraculous finale. (''We have done our work, let the children play in the world which our work has made safer and happier for them'', as Tovey puts it.) The great representative recording here—seemingly forgotten by DG—was made in Berlin in 1960 by Geza Anda under Ferenc Fricsay's matchlessly idiomatic direction (6/61—nla). The new version, it has to be said, is almost in the same league.
In the end, record collectors as opposed to concert-goers are going to ask, is Gilels's celebrated Berlin recording (recently issued on a single mid-price Galleria disc) seriously challenged? Challenged, I think, but not surpassed. Technically, the 1972 DG recording, made in Berlin's Jesus-Christus Kirche, hasn't dated. Indeed, on the fraught question of the balance of the solo cello in the slow movement, it is to be preferred, with the soloist (the incomparable Ottomar Borwitzky) much less obviously spotlit than on this new Philips disc. Gilels has intelligence and fantasy in abundance; yet without aiming at an Arrau-like massiveness he is ultimately a more powerful protagonist than Brendel.
True, Gilels does half-smudge the odd chord but, then, his recording gives the impression of having being put down in a handful of massive musically organic takes, where the new Philips occasionally betrays signs of cutting-room technology. Certainly, none of the 20 or so currently available soloists matches Gilels in the concerto's slow movement where the playing is astonishing in its absorption and intense, concentrated quiet. ''A few notes spaced out like the first stars that penetrate the sky at sunset'', as Tovey describes the miraculous midway section.'