What are being offered here are Beethoven's Second and Fourth Piano Concertos as we have never quite heard them before. Or as the Conifer box has it: ''World premiere recording with the composer's final revisions transcribed and edited by Dr Barry Cooper''. Final revisions? Well, yes and no. Of the two, the early B flat Concerto offers the simpler case and the one that is most likely to win general acceptance.
Dr Cooper has already traced the concerto's compositional history in exhaustive detail in the final chapter of his book Beethoven and the Creative Process (OUP: 1990, pages 283-303). It is a concerto that was begun way back in 1787, when Beethoven was 17, and which was finally completed in 1801 when he added some small emendations to a text he had evolved during rewrites and revisions in 1793, 1795 and 1798. Though the emendations of 1801 are in the autograph manuscript, they were added too late for the printers to incorporate them into the published text; since when, the revised pages—or those of them that survived—have lain largely unregarded in the Prussian State Library in Berlin. It is these surviving emendations of 1801 that now appear on this Conifer recording.
One change is arresting. It is the romantically charged G flat that prepares the way for the shift to D flat major at bar 41 (1'11''). Certainly, a case can be made for adopting this as part of any new Urtext. It would be unfair to say that the other changes are nugatory, though they are certainly less striking.
The case for accepting—on any kind of permanent basis—the emendations Beethoven made to the Fourth Concerto is far more problematic. What Dr Cooper has unearthed and re-examined is a celebrated set of musical scrawls Beethoven added to the autograph manuscript at the time of the first performance of the concerto during a notorious marathon concert in Vienna on December 22nd, 1808. (Other works being premiered that day were the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the Choral Fantasia, Op. 80!)
These manuscript jottings, affecting the first and last movements, post-date the official publication of the Fourth Concerto in August 1808. In as much as the piano Beethoven used at the premiere had a wider range than the one he had in mind when writing, some of the emended top notes are of interest. (You can hear examples of this in the first movement coda, after the cadenza.) Other changes, though, are bizarre. As Dr Cooper concedes, there is evidence from Czerny that Beethoven was in somewhat mischievous (mutwillig) mood on December 22nd, 1808. Certainly, there are a couple of moments in the finale—at 2'31'' and 6'13'' on the new disc—where the Great Man was clearly poking fun. A nice tease on the night, perhaps, but hardly an improvement on the more considered transitions settled on at the time of composition.
Here we run up against a rather broader issue. How seriously should we take the random afterthoughts that occur to musicians or writers months or years after the finished work (in as much as any such thing can ever be said to exist) has been signed, sealed and delivered into the public domain? How, for instance, do we judge Dvorak's subsequent instruction to ignore the exposition repeat in the first movement of his Sixth Symphony? As a genuinely useful insight, or as the whim of a man no longer as fully engaged with the piece as he was at the time of composition?
With Beethoven's Fourth Concerto there is an additional problem which, paradoxically, the Conifer CD rather highlights. At the concert in December 1808 Beethoven altered the start of the development (7'35''). In my view, he coarsens it. (As many pianists used to do when faced with the subtler dynamics of the familiar text.) Certainly, it offers a more extrovert, more virtuosic view of the music. Played by a pianist like Horowitz or Cherkassky, on the spot as a kind of musical 'dare', it could rivet sense. Unfortunately, that is not what we have here. The 35-year-old Russian pianist Mikhail Kazakevich is dapper and stylish and not at all a bad exponent of the B flat Concerto. What he rather damagingly lacks in the G major is presence—the ability to fill out his sound and shape dynamic levels in a way that allows the music to speak out eloquently.
Thus the Conifer project has a flaw at its centre: a modest, rather underweight performance of a view of the Fourth Concerto that was committed to paper by Beethoven at the time of a public concert, when he was even by his own extraordinary standards in more than usually mischievous mood.
In the end it is difficult to see these emendations of December 1808 as anything other than a diversion, an amusing curiosity that stands at a tangent to the main thrust of the creative process. A gift, as I say, to a Horowitz or a Cherkassky, and fun to hear once in a while, but no more than that.
I should add that Sir Charles Mackerras is at his stylish best in the B flat Concerto and in the outer movements of the G major. (For some reason, the slow movement of the G major is oddly rushed.) He is, of course, a one-man forensic laboratory in his own right, a worthy ally for Dr Cooper. Sir Charles is also a fine accompanist, even though what he does sometimes outshines the work of his gracious but rather too modest soloist.'