The Philharmonia under Giulini, the LSO under Szell, Jochum and the Berlin Philharmonic, Sawallisch and the LPO at its Brahmsian best: it is a formidable line-up which Rattle’s CBSO players match desk for desk in this formidable, thrilling and superbly directed new account of the D minor Concerto.
The sonorities are full and dark, echt-Brahmsian, the string sound centred in the violas and cellos, as in Giulini’s 1960 Philharmonia recording. The timpani playing is also outstanding, with magnificent articulation of the hallmark trills, themselves flawlessly matched to the huge answering trills of soloist and full orchestra. It is an expressive performance which also has tremendous drive and contrapuntal clarity, the agogic shifts never drawing attention to themselves as they have sometimes been inclined to do on record in the past where Rattle is concerned. The pianissimo string playing in the slow movement has to be heard to be believed, intensely quiet yet with a ‘nerve’ in it (as Pavarotti once said of Karajan’s pianissimo): what Giulini, quoting Toscanini, described as pianissimo in volume but forte in expression.
First impressions, in this concerto, can be notoriously misleading: that gently undulating entry, like a Bach two-part invention, and then the big solo statement which some pianists like to play ‘straight’ (Curzon, my particular favourite) and which others like to reflect on (Gilels, extremely idiosyncratic, and, slightly less idiosyncratic, Kovacevich and now Andsnes).
Certainly, this is a performance that the ‘nodal point’ school of reviewing is likely to misread since there is about Andsnes’s initial entry an urbanity and polish that will strike some as being more apt to the manner of Saint-Saens than to old Herr Gruff-and-Grum from Hamburg with his jokes about his ‘musical’ left thumb.
The performance is not, however, in any way in thrall to urbanity and polish. True, it is not as self-evidently weighty as Arrau’s. That older generation of players – Backhaus was another – whose phrasing of a Brahms melody, as it were, takes you by the elbow is long gone, alas. You notice this more in Andsnes’s fill-up, the Op. 117 Intermezzos, where No. 2 is exquisitely done, a hauntingly lovely reverie, but where No. 1 is inclined to be mannered (the opening sentence fractured by odd phrasing and too marked a ritardando at the end) and the opening of No. 3 is not at all ominous. The performance of the concerto, however, is certainly not lacking in gravitas or power. Indeed, the more I hear it the more aware I am of just how formidable Andsnes’s playing is technically, and how mature emotionally.
The recording is magnificent, of demonstration quality: to the 1990s what the Curzon/Szell/Decca was to the 1960s. In this respect, it overtops its most recent rival in my selected comparisons, the Kovacevich/Sawallisch, also on EMI. But that remains formidable, too. If Rattle outguns Sawallisch, Kovacevich could be said to be marginally the more individual soloist. And his fill-ups, the two songs with piano and viola, are not to be missed.
Still, anyone happening on the D minor Concerto in the new Andsnes/CBSO/Rattle recording will not be disappointed. Aided by that superb recording, it has about it a true sense of ‘occasion’, with beauties, excitements and moments of torrential splendour that are distinctively and thrillingly its own.'