Making Bartok's First Piano Concerto sound fun must have taken some doing, but Donohoe and Rattle have certainly managed it. I've never heard the outer movements chuckle with such impish excitement; even by 1'04'' into the first movement pianist and winds are busily embroiled in breathless banter, and when, at 5'16'', the argument hots up and the pace accelerates, the whole proceedings take on the spirit of a fairground helter-skelter. What's particularly engaging about this performance is its joyful belligerence, a quality that must have sat at the very centre of Bartok's prompting inspiration. But in praising Donohoe's digital dexterity and Rattle's textual vigilance, I must also mention Andrew Keener: his production not only reveals more of the music than any rival version, but it actually locates details that we wouldn't hope to hear in concert. Rather than have the piano pounding in the foreground, Keener blends the instrument in among the orchestra, so that Rattle's sensitivity to nuance, Donohoe's lightness of touch and the accommodating acoustic of Birmingham's Symphony Hall transform what we frequently hear as an angular confrontation into something genuinely palatable. Judicious balancing is equally supportive of the Andante, especially from 3'01'', where a Bluebeard-style clarinet instigates a wonderful climactic arch, with Donohoe trudging dense chords and the winds wailing high above him.
The Second Concerto alone was taped at Butterworth Hall, Warwick Arts Centre—a less helpful acoustic, especially for a work that has such a relentlessly busy first movement. So much happens at breakneck speed that the chances of tapping in every detail 'dead on target' are extremely remote. Yet this impressively urgent account could hold its own in any company, even though there are one or two passages where articulation momentarily falters. The rest is either pungent or evocative: the second movement's 'night music' Adagio sections are beautifully sustained and the finale has terrific elan.
For the Third Concerto, it's back to Symphony Hall and comparatively luminous textures. Rattle affects an attractive diminuendo across the opening bars, signalling any number of subtle variations in pulse and dynamics, all of them calculated to support the music's tender complexion. Listen to the way he nudges the upwardly-rising pizzicato strings at the close of the first movement (from 6'38'') and the evenness of held wind chords in the Adagio religioso—a reading that journeys from simple affirmation to pain, and back again. As in the Second Concerto, the invisible world of insect nightlife teems through the movement's centre, animating its surface and providing Donohoe, Rattle and the CBSO with an expansive colouring book. Only the finale struck me as a little earthbound (compare Kocsis and Fischer), but then anything more aggressive would probably have contradicted the lyrical bias of what went before.
Taken overall, this is a marvellous trio of performances and serves as a fresh reminder of just how great these works are. Its only serious rival would be a single CD of the vintage Geza Anda/Ferenc Fricsay recordings, a sure-fire potential contender for DG's Twentieth Century Classics series.'