The D minor Concerto has often cast a special spell over its interpreters. The late Glenn Gould suggested that with all its architectural deficiencies it is the most intriguing of Brahms's orchestral scores and went on to argue that it could be approached either as a romantic concerto full of high drama, contrasts, angularities and inequalities (a work with ''a lot of surprises, a moral position full of contradictions'') or as an altogether more cogent piece, ''a sophisticated weaving of a fundamental motivic strand'' that Schoenberg would have looked at with absorbing interest.
Perhaps it isn't so black and white as that. The finest performances on record by pianists and conductors such as Schnabel (EMI—nla) or Curzon (Decca) and Szell, Gilels and Jochum (DG), and now Brendel and Abbado have brought a measure of inner coherence to the work at no real cost to its quirky variousness and its capacity to shock and surprise.
The new performance is notable for the lucidity of Brendel's playing, for the finely hones, scrupulously attentive playing of the Berlin Philharmonic under Abbado, and for a recording which, for once, allows us to hear the Berliners in natural perspectives, horns and trumpets at a proper distance, nothing too brightly lit, the piano primus inter pares. (Philips should go to Berlin more often.) In his interview with HF on page 703 Brendel talks of ''knowing what is necessary'' and in as much as it is worth comparing the new performance with his older now deleted one, also on Philips, under Schmidt-Isserstedt (''the past is a foreigh country'', Brendel implies, ''I did things differently there'') it would seem that the reading has become less the traditional concerto account, more that ''sophisticated weaving of a fundamental motivic strand'' of which Gould speaks.
Other comparisons are, of course, humanly inevitably, commercially necessary. In a bad performance of the D minor Concerto the pianist out-smarts the conductor (Pollini, with Bohm on DG is a notorious example) or vice versa. The conductor often sets the tone of the performance. Jochum, with Gilels, digs deeper into the work's sonic substructure than most of his rivals, Szell (for Schnabel and Curzon) binds the entire work together with an inimitable fieriness. (Hilary Finch's reference to the finale's ''taut, cogwheel working out'' suits Szell to a T!) Technically, gilels seems to have more in reserve than Brendel or Curzon, finely as they play; as a result, the work seems a bit bigger, more massive. Some may like this. Whether Gilels ''knows'' the work (Brendel's term) as well as Brendel, I can't say. He had not played it in public, it is said, before the DG recording. There are many ways of knowing.
No one, I trust, will deny that Arrau has lived with, wrestled with, and in a truly terribly way 'known' the D minor Concerto for more years than most of us can consciously recall. where contemporary pianists have often tended to refine or domesticate the concerto, withdrawing it from the world of heroic endeavour, Arrau has always done the reverse. No pianist, apart possibly from Serkin in his several recordings, has communicated so formidably the work's scope: its seriousness and its anxious, tragic mood. Often Arrau makes free with the text. It is an uncomfortable reading to meet. But the vision is huge, the technique astonishing. Haitink is a worthy accompanist. Jochom would have met Arrau squarely on his own ground, as Giulini more or less did in an earlier deleted EMI recording but such encounters are not for the gramophone. They belong to one-off live performances where the hall and the occasion better meet the listener's needs. The 1970 Philips recording is reasonably clean, though some tape background remains in the digital remastering. Arrau and Brendel represent very different schools of piano playing, interpretation, and the like. To possess both recordings is to set yourself up with food for thought and debate that will last you long into the night. Gilels's two-CD set of the two concertos is a wonderful investment: performances that have a lot to say, gloriously played, well recorded. And for those of us who value Brahm's peculiar brand of personally involving, highly-strung classicism there is always the Curzon, as vital and imaginative today as when it first appeared in 1962.'