The world’s broadcast vaults continue to offer their bounty
to the Caesar of commercial traffic. Often this results, as
here, in multiple duplications from an artist’s studio
or indeed live discography. It’s for the market to deal
with this increase of possibilities whilst the critic can sit
back and enjoy the largesse that comes his way.
And in Gilels’ case, it really is largesse. A performance
of Beethoven’s G major Concerto may elicit a wary response,
given not only his commendable studio recordings with Ludwig
and Szell, but also the existence of live performances with
Sanderling, Pradella and Sawallisch amongst others. But his
collaboration with Barbirolli, live from the Usher Hall in Edinburgh,
brings a subtly different series of responses. There is a just
balance between grand intensity and introspective stasis, though
it could be suggested that tempi and rubati sometimes incline
more to the latter interpretative position. Certainly Barbirolli
was not, at this stage of his life, the kind of concerto accompanist
who would goad a soloist, or who would drive a tempo. His gifts
in this role had long been acknowledged, even as he came to
resent the appellation of ‘concerto accompanist’.
The slow movement contrasts a sinewy, implacable orchestra against,
at first, a barely audible piano, and the music inexorably relinquishes
its dialectical grip, unwinding until it reaches a space seemingly
ungoverned by time. Such moments of near-immobility recur in
the finale to less extreme effect because here the balance of
the music is dynamic and engaged. In this performance, Gilels
seems to be moving toward the outermost limits of introspection;
certainly amongst the most introspective that I have heard from
him on disc in this work.
Such considerations don’t really apply in the case of
Tchaikovsky’s Second Concerto. The orchestra is the LPO,
and the conductor an equally great accompanist, though one of
a very different stripe, Kirill Kondrashin. The sound here from
the BBC’s Maida Vale studios is good and rather less hissy
than the Usher Hall concert. Gilels and Kondrashin use Siloti’s
edition of the concerto - what would doubtless be called a mash-up
today. Notwithstanding this, the command of rhetoric, romance
and passion is remarkable and Kondrashin encourages the LPO
fully to collaborate, an invocation extended to the two string
soloists in the slow movement where the music thins to chamber
intimacies and conversational reflection. The finale by contrast
is genuinely fiery and exciting. The 1959 Leningrad recording
with (again) Kondrashin may be its superior, and there is also
the 1972 Svetlanov to consider alongside the studio New Philharmonia/Maazel,
but this London reading has great merit.
The disc enshrines two performances of subtlety and power. Whether
you need it depends on your priorities with regard to live material
and duplication. But I’m very glad, and fortunate, to
have heard it.
Jonathan Woolf
Emil Gilels (piano) 