Harmonia Mundi, which celebrated Beethoven’s semiquincentenary with original-instrument performances of the five canonic concertos and Choral Fantasy with Kristian Bezuidenhout and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra under Pablo Heras-Casado, has released another fascinating and thought-provoking Beethoven album. Though this is not an original-instrument recording, it is certainly a historically informed one. Ensemble Resonanz, at 36 players for this recording, is a hybrid group of the type pioneered by Harnoncourt: modern strings and woodwinds alongside natural brass instruments with modern mouthpieces, natural trumpets with holes, and period timpani. Gianluca Cascioli plays a modern piano.

Czerny said that when Beethoven performed his Fourth Piano Concerto, he played many more notes than indicated in the published score. What those notes might have been is suggested by a copyist’s manuscript in the archives of Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. It was prepared by Josef Klumpar and used as the basis for the Concerto’s first publication in 1808. Beethoven himself made a number of annotations to the Klumpar manuscript, embellishing the solo part. Scholars have known about this document for well over a century but the difficulties of deciphering and placing Beethoven’s cryptic annotations have meant that performances have been rare. A high-resolution colour photograph of the Klumpar manuscript enabled Cascioli and Minasi to develop the expanded version of the solo part heard on this recording. Cadenzas for the first movement of the G major Concerto and for the composer’s transcription of the Violin Concerto are not the familiar ones but those thought to have been composed for the Archduke Rudolf.

Meticulous attention to these and myriad other musico-philological concerns results in compelling performances of considerable warmth, beauty and spontaneity. Minasi and Cascioli do not shy away from fluctuations of tempo within movements. However, because these always stem from specific harmonic and rhetorical implications in the score, they never sound less than natural and appropriate. Notably, in the slow movement of the G major Concerto, Cascioli and Minasi follow Czerny’s admonition that ‘the pianist may restrain the time rather more than the orchestra’, lending a special eloquence to one of the profound utterances of the piano concertante repertory.

Both for the sympathetic realisation of the seldom-encountered transcription of the Violin Concerto and for the felicitous light shed on the G major Concerto, these lovingly prepared performances should not be missed.