Let me lay out information first of all: this is the conclusion of
Yevgeny Sudbin’s cycle of the five Beethoven concertos that began, back
to front, with an issue of Nos 4 and 5 together (4/11) and continued
with a coupling of No 3 in C minor with the Mozart C minor Concerto (No
24), K491 (5/14). Osmo Vänskä has been the conductor throughout, with
the Tapiola Sinfonietta here and previously with the Minnesota
Orchestra. I note for now that the first CD was received with enthusiasm
and was an Editor’s Choice; the next, in which No 3 was paired with the
Mozart, fared less well.
It is impossible to hold back from admiration for Sudbin in whatever
he plays, thanks to his brilliance and hallmark exuberance. He has much
to say and he wants us to listen. You may feel the hyperactive style he
brings to the outer movements of these concertos is just what they
require. I am not so sure. The exuberance, for me, tips over to a
cat-on-hot-bricks manner that too often seems a default position and
wearisome. ‘Halt,’ I want to cry, ‘couldn’t you please occasionally calm
down a bit?’ Need sforzato accents always be like touches of a
whip and scales the length of a piece of string? Vänskä and the
orchestra are willing partners. I resist too their bass-heavy sound
world, built around microphone placements, which projects a nervy,
fidgety view of dynamics in which a level is rarely sustained for its
full term. Try the opening of the C major Concerto (No 1) – marked pianissimo until a crescendo leads into the first fortissimo
at bar 16 – as an example of what I mean. To me, this is so much more
exciting if the very quiet martial energy at the beginning is held taut.
It’s the sort of detail a great conductor with a major orchestra and
demanding soloist will agree upon and get right.
Oh dear, I’m sounding grouchy. I want the prospect of admiring Sudbin
as much in Beethoven as in Scarlatti and Scriabin; but it is not there.
He is sparky and generous with impulses and good ideas, but restless.
The Largo of the C major Concerto, the longest slow movement in
all the concertos, shows how the best of ‘early’ Beethoven is every bit
as characteristic as the later, with an appreciation, in this instance,
of the clarinet and solo writing for it that he never surpassed. I
treated myself to Sony Classical’s box of Sviatoslav Richter’s complete
live and studio recordings for RCA and Columbia; seek it out if you can
for the performance he gave with Charles Munch and the Boston SO of this
concerto in November 1960. Yes, from way back, I know, but
incomparable.
Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny remarked that the master ‘brings out
difficulties and effects on the piano that we could never have
imagined’. Yevgeny Sudbin at his best is an artist capable of reminding
us of that and there is plentiful evidence in these rondo finales. Don’t
get me started on his cadenzas. They ignore all the material Beethoven
left for Concerto No 1, which he finds wanting in various ways, playing
in the first and last movements cadenzas of his own (‘based on
Friedheim’). Suffer them if you can; I couldn’t possibly comment.
There’s a mistranslation in the booklet of the German note which makes a
nonsense of where the cadenza comes in the first movement of the B flat
Concerto (No 2). (Stephen Plaistow / Gramophone)
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