Virgin Classics
has embarked on a large reissue programme of which this forms
part. Some are simply repackaged with cursory notes, as here,
whilst others sport the money-saving notes and have undergone
a change of coupling. A record company can’t really win with
this release. It only has the B flat major concerto, which some
will feel short measure; but if the company shoehorns some coupling,
critics will doubtless note its irrelevance, incongruity, or
whatever.
We have what we
have, then, and it’s Hough’s recording with Andrew Davis. There
are no recording locations or dates but I infer that it was
a recorded in 1990. Nearly twenty years later I daresay Hough
would do some things differently, but then a recording is, as
executant musicians invariably note, a crudely captured moment
made during their long professional lives.
I sense the rationale
of the performance is an attempt to reconcile the grandiose
self-assertive rhetoric of part of it with the intimate and
delicate introversion of its other self. The trouble, for me
at least, is that it sounds like two performances struggling
to sound compatible. It opens in rather toughly foursquare fashion,
oddly over-ruminative. Davis works well with Hough, seconding
his view of the work and accommodating the orchestral fabric
appropriately, though I don’t think it could be argued that
the BBC Orchestra covers itself with glory. Hough is at pains
to stress little moments of lyric reprieve in the first movement
but the emergent feeling is one of a lack of real dynamism.
The two aspects are not reconciled; consequently the “tone”
of the performance remains elusive.
There’s no doubting
some fine aspects of the playing – the end of the first movement
is well caught by the microphone and not bathed in a triumphant
blur as it all too often can be; piano lines are well balanced.
Hough plays with sonorous rounded tone in the more cantabile
sections, alternating with a harder, more brittle palette when
needed. There are certainly some highly charged and poetic moments
in the Scherzo. And Tim Hugh’s cello solo in the slow movement
possesses a reserved nobility, though it’s not consistently
inspired form beginning to end. The finale unfortunately is
rather heavy and monochromatic. The kind of excitement, vitality
and humour that coursed through, say, Rubinstein’s traversal
of the work is not evident in the duller contributions on offer
here.
Given the foregoing
this is really not a contender. I appreciate that the Gilels/Jochum
DG is a tried and trusted critical recommendation but it holds
orchestral, intellectual, poetic and digital matters in perfect
balance, qualities that this present reissue cannot begin to
approach.
Jonathan Woolf
Stephen Hough
(piano) 
