Christoph Eschenbach is perhaps fortunate to have secured a niche in this particular pantheon. His career as a solo pianist featured a brilliant exposition but little in the way of a development or recapitulation. By the mid-1970s, he was turning increasingly to conducting and chamber music. Still, it was a brilliant enough exposition, as this survey of the expository years 1964-74 largely proves.
The survey lacks the key achievement of Eschenbach’s early years, the world premiere recording of Henze’s Second Piano Concerto (1968) , but then this was not what Eschenbach was famous for in his early years. As New Grove put it in 1980, ‘It is partly for his carefully worked and poetical performances of Beethoven, Mozart and Schumann that he is most highly regarded.‘
As an anthology, this has been well selected but poorly assembled. Chronology should have been the guiding principle, with the Mozart Variations (1964) , the early Schumann (1966) and the Beethoven First Concerto (1966) on the first disc, the Mozart and Haydn sonatas and the big Schubert A major Sonata (1973) on the second. Should you acquire the set, this is certainly the order in which it is best explored.
The faux-naif charm of Mozart’s 12 Variations on ‘Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman’, and Eschenbach’s dazzlingly pure, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth playing in this 1964 debut are entirely beguiling. (Was Clara Haskil’s wonderful late recording, made in Lucerne for DG in 1960, the model here? If so, it was well chosen and finely absorbed, with a touch of youthful devilry Haskil doesn’t quite aspire to.)
The 1966 Schumann recital was not widely collected (unaccountably, The Gramophone failed to review it) but was often spoken of by Schumann aficionados keen to have the ABEGG Variations - ‘glitter and be gay’ seems to be Eschenbach’s motto here - and the even more rarely recorded Op. 4 Intermezzos. It is strange that so few pianists bother with these Intermezzos. The music is witty and robust (there are echoes of Beethoven’s Bagatelles, even a Diabelli-like resourcefulness) with a real sense of theatre. Of the penultimate piece, Schumann wrote: ‘An opera without text - but my whole heart is in you, dear fifth Intermezzo, which was born with such unutterable love. ‘The young Eschenbach had the measure of all this; 30 years on, it is again the recording to have.
Also from 1966 is the Beethoven concerto recording with Karajan. The original LP cover photograph revealed the two of them seated together at the keyboard: young Eschenbach, clad in a Karajan-style black polo-neck, gazing winningly at the maestro, Karajan chastely studying Eschenbach’s hands. It also had a circled figure 1 in the corner, suggesting that a cycle was planned. A cycle, it was later revealed, had been contemplated, with different orchestras and conductors; in the event, it never got beyond this and recordings of the C minor Concerto with Henze and the LSO and the Emperor with Ozawa in Boston.
It is a bewitching performance (it bewitched The Gramophone’s Trevor Harvey, a man not easily taken in by acts of musical sorcery) though a somewhat egregious one. In the first movement, Karajan sets and sustains an astonishingly broad tempo, exquisitely sounded on the orchestra and exquisitely answered by Eschenbach with playing that is buoyant and dazzlingly ‘fine’. This may appear to be a recipe for inert navel-gazing but this isn’t the case. The music simply goes on growing and growing - towards a stunning performance of the big third cadenza, strategically shorn of its late G major jollity and jokey f, p, fff end.
The performance of the slow movement offers as aesthetically pleasing an account of the music as it is possible to imagine. (A typical small detail, alluded to by TH in his original review, is Eschenbach’s unfurling of the long trill at 12'14''.) The finale is properly allegro, properly scherzando, and properly proud but with visionary dream-states never entirely forgotten. As to the text, it is Eulenberg 1922 and no nonsense, with expressive appoggiaturas in bars 100-01 of the slow movement (11'17'') and Eulenberg’s totally un-PC presto cadenza (7'33'') in the finale’s exhilarating coda.
Nothing in the rest of the set quite matches these earlier performances. The 1969 recording of Mozart’s Sonata, K332, draws superlatives from Ates Orga in his colourful and informative note (I had no idea that Eschenbach’s mother died in childbirth, his father in action). Here I think Orga is nearer the mark than SP in his original review, which was far from complimentary. However, I tend to agree with SP about Eschenbach’s Haydn, where it is possible to be left with ‘a general impression of someone speaking a language fluently but without awareness of its potential for varied and characteristic expression.‘
As to Eschenbach’s performance of Schubert’s titanic late A major Sonata, Orga is right to characterize it as ‘assertively individual, contrasting (sometimes extremely so) the belligerent with the reflective, hewn argument with highlit emotion, murmured dynamics with desperate fortes. ‘It is not as cogently fierce, still, and idiomatically middle-European a recording as Schnabel’s or Serkin’s. That said, selected comparisons are by the by here. What the Schubert recording reveals is a sudden welling up of anger and Angst in Eschenbach’s musical persona. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the year this recording was made, rightly or wrongly, he began looking beyond the piano to a larger stage on which to explore his musical promptings.'