We’re
up to number eight in Naxos’s Moiseiwitsch edition. This takes us to
his big Beethoven Concerto recordings
made either side of the War, the Emperor
with Szell and the C minor with Sargent.
The latter was of course a dab hand
in this kind of repertoire and this
kind of role. His stint as Schnabel’s
colleague – via the Courtauld-Sargent
concerts - and finally the recorded
cycle of Concertos had done his international
reputation no harm at all. Sargent
doesn’t screw up the tension as tightly
as Boult had done for Solomon in 1943
but this rather
better suits his soloist’s
more elegant and poetic approach,
one that’s not devoid of drama but
that subsumes it more to a lyric curve.
Sargent scores highly in unravelling
the middle string voices in the slow
movement (try sampling from about
5’00 onwards for some scrupulous moulding)
though Moiseiwitsch’s phrasing in
the finale can, if one’s unsympathetic,
be thought somewhat fidgety.
A
dozen years earlier he collaborated
with Szell in the Emperor.
This doesn’t sound to have been
a true meeting either of minds or
of musical sensibilities. There are
some metrical displacements – rather
unstylish, even for the time - and
a strong series of dynamics from the
pianist but how admirably Szell gets
the winds piping up and also how well
Moiseiwitsch shapes left hand voicings
from about 10.00 onwards. For all
that it isn’t especially plodding,
it feels too slow as well. And despite
Szell’s characterisation of the slow
movement as feminine sounding it too
is a mite slow, though the finale
features plenty of the soloist’s wonderful
pearl-bejewelled tone.
The
sound of the C minor is good, vintage
1950. In the Emperor
Mark Obert-Thorn has retained
a relatively high level of surface
noise. I could have done with a judicious
cut, but the sound is certainly forward
and unobscured.
Jonathan
Woolf
see also review by Christopher
Howell
Benno Moiseiwitsch (piano) with orchestras and
conductors as above
