CLASSICAL

A good first choice

BRAHMS: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 15; Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 83. Nelson Freire (piano), Gewandhausorchester conducted by Riccardo Chailly. Decca B0006588-2 (two CDs)

UNG-AANG TALAY

Recording companies have been preserving great performances of these two concertos since the early days of recorded sound. By now there are so many fine accounts, both in and out of print, that most listeners who love them have probably settled on a number of favourites that hold their own against the welter of new versions that appear regularly. Still, every once in a while a new recorded performance of one or the other of these concertos appears that forces you to listen to this ultra-familiar music as if it were new again. These recent live recordings by Nelson Freire and Riccardo Chailly of both concertos have had that effect on me, the first new accounts to have done so since the Kovacevich/Sawallisch accounts were released by EMI back in the early 1990s.

The version of the First Concerto that I have always returned to is Leon Fleisher's with the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by George Szell (included in a Sony Masterworks Heritage two-disc set together with the Second Concerto and some solo piano works). It still seems to me to be in a class of its own in fusing youthful impetuousness (it is, after all, only Brahms's Op. 15) with the feelings of tragedy and romantic passion aroused by the circumstances that inspired the work.

As Bryce Morrison explains in the notes to this new release, the First Concerto was composed during the mental collapse of Robert Schumann, whom he revered, and whose wife he had secretly fallen in love with. Szell's stormy way with the extended orchestral introduction to the opening movement and Fleisher's steely, intense articulation of the trills that fill the movement make the music's anguish palpable in a way that no listener who knows the performance will forget. The Adagio second movement, too, is full of youthful feeling of a more tender kind (Brahms described it as a portrait of Clara Schumann).

Only a few of the recordings made since Fleisher's came out in the late 1950s - Serkin's and Kovacevich's, for example - generate that kind of electricity. Even the famous Gilels/Jochum performance on DG, often cited as a touchstone account, sounds a bit geriatric by comparison. But this new Freire/Chailly interpretation achieves something similar.

Riccardo Chailly is a master at comprehending the performance styles of highly individual soloists. Anyone who has heard the live recording he made of the Rachmaninov Third Concerto with Freire's close friend Martha Argerich knows this. Here he launches the dark music that begins the First Concerto with a feeling of high tragedy that yields little to Szell. Listen to the tension generated right from the first bar by the roaring timpani and highly energised trills in the strings in winds. It isn't as hard-edged as what Szell elicits from his Cleveland Orchestra, but creates a comparably turbulent atmosphere, and the much superior Decca engineering makes everything audible.

Freire's entry into this violent musical landscape (at 3:34) is reticent but minutely responsive to its emotional currents. Listen to how he shapes the arching figure at the end of the first sentence of the piano's opening music, and to the naturalness with which he allows the passage that follows to gather urgency until its despairing outcry after 4:20. And so on throughout the performance. The introspective aspect of the concerto, especially in the second movement, where the young Brahms's feeling for Clara Schumann are closest to the surface, finds expression in playing of the greatest delicacy. The feeling of heartbreak in the passage beginning around 4:14 of the Adagio is so strong, and the playing so limpid, that you hold your breath as you listen.

Freire and Chailly offer an account of the Second Concerto that places more emphasis on the score's lyricism than on its monumental quality. The drama is all there - the Allegro appassionato second movement is thrilling - but it isn't as visceral as in such high-voltage performances as Gilels/Reiner or, especially, the knockout 1942 recording by Fischer and Furtwaengler with the Berlin Philharmonic. What impresses most is the depth of feeling this interpretation finds in the Andante third movement, music that many listeners may feel that they have heard enough of for one lifetime. There is no schmaltz or excessive sentimentality here, and the piano's entry, gradually descending from above, is ravishingly played. The concluding Allegretto grazioso with its lightly skipping opening theme is gracefully done, although neither the performance here nor any other eclipses Sviatoslav Richter's magical performance of this music in his recording with Leinsdorf.

Before acquiring this release I had never heard Freire play Brahms, but on the evidence of this recording he has been living with both of these concertos for a very long time. This Decca set is a good first choice among available recordings of the two concertos in a single set. But listeners devoted to these concertos should also try to hear the other versions mentioned above, especially Fleisher/Szell for the First Concerto and Gilels/Reiner and Fischer/Furtwaengler for the Second.

Bangkok Post
Friday February 02, 2007