This is the iconic
coupling of course – spiced by the sparkling
Litolff – that served down the LP age
as surely as the Bruch G minor/Mendelssohn
did for violin concertos. It still serves
in the CD age, as numerous issues show.
When prosaic pianistic
chops were handed out Joyce Hatto was
not around. That much is clear from
her recordings generally and with respect
to this one the Grieg reinforces the
point. She made a number of recordings
with the late René Köhler
and his band with its haughty-sounding
pretensions to the kind of status enjoyed
by another erstwhile Philharmonic-Symphony
- that of New York in the days of Toscanini,
Barbirolli, Rodzinski et al – and this
is the latest to arrive.
They make a good, trenchant
sound with crisply focused tuttis very
nicely caught by the recording team
and string choirs making their mark
with convincing tonal allure. Winds
are characterful and lyric. Hatto’s
view of this work, adeptly partnered
by Köhler, is an intensely poetic
even prayerful one. It abjures the bombastic
and the plushly extrovert. So, for example,
she takes the molto moderato
that qualifies the opening movement’s
Allegro and insists on it. She spins
a dreamy line, full of elastic melodic
impress and displays a persistent refusal
to build to precipitant climaxes. It’s
a slow reading of this movement and
some may find it rather too determined
to excavate the more interior Peer Gynt
moments; the cadenza is considered rather
than overtly or explicitly exciting
and the climax is measured.
But what Hatto insists
on is the less obvious aspects of a
work so often played as a barnstormer;
the prayerful gentleness of the slow
movement, the pious, almost religious
unfolding of the string cantilena, a
certain dignity if you like. That’s
not to discount the nimble filigree
of her open air playing in the finale,
her articulate watchful trajectory.
It’s a different reading of the work
and remains consistent throughout, no
mean feat. Two of her august British
predecessors in this work, Curzon and
Solomon, took very different views,
naturally – the latter tending to milk
the slow movement somewhat, though with
gorgeous liquidity it must be admitted.
Hatto is rather more of an Apollonian
in this work; there are plenty of Dionysiacs
as it is. Poetic and noble are the adjectives
that I would use to characterise this
performance and, rather like her unusually
Gallic recording of Prokofiev’s Third
Concerto, it will divide opinion. But
for those jaded or bored by "yet
another Grieg" it offers a poetic,
personalised and rich infusion.
For the Schumann we
move back two years and into a rather
more resonant recorded acoustic than
that for the Grieg. It imparts a certain
halo to the piano sound but not an unattractive
one. Her way with this is rather less
individualised than the Grieg. She’s
not at all averse to some captivatingly
witty phrasing in the opening movement.
And while her playing and phrasing are
very different from a one-time advisor
such as Cortot (whose recording with
Landon Ronald is seldom absent from
the turntable) she nevertheless manages
to evoke something of the preternatural
stillness, by strongly different means,
that he summoned up. She arches and
relaxes with considerable romantic persuasiveness
here and equally in the central movement
– never indulgent for a moment – and
manages to evoke a concentrated stasis
of utterance that is most impressive
for its conflation of finger dexterity
and control - and retardation - of momentum.
She etches less than
other powerful Schumann exponents such
as Géza Anda for instance, and
inclines to a more pliant architectural
line though you’ll find the Phil-Symph’s
woodwinds are no match for Kubelik’s
classic Berlin Philharmonic. In the
finale she doesn’t stint the wit but
neither does she allow the music to
fracture as it so often can into trinkets
of finery and stop-start rhetoric. So
she’s less immediately colourful and
quixotic than Anda but keeps the argument
commensurately tight and forward moving.
There’s a sparkling
bonus in the shape of the Litolff, a
work I always associate with Irene Scharrer
from days of yore. Here it really glitters.
Jonathan Woolf
Joyce Hatto (piano) 
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