Beethoven

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No 5, 'Emperor',Op. 73
Christian Zacharias pf

Staatskapelle Dresden/Hans Vonk

EMI CDC7 49372-2 (37 minutes : DDD)

Reviewed: Gramophone (3/1989)

I recall Christian Zacharias being spoken of highly when it was comparatively difficult to acquire any of his recordings in the UK. Indeed, I remember being played part of an expert and engaging Domenico Scarlatti recital record. Beethoven and Mozart being generally better box-office than Scarlatti, some of Zacharias's recent recordings have appeared over here with reasonable promptness, though I'm not certain, the finale apart, the Emperor Concerto is a work which most sympathetically reveals his emerging talent. It is a fluent, dextrous, often imaginative performance with plenty of energy, latent and actual, and some sensitive shadings of tone and rhythm. (The resolution of the high trill in the first movement cadenza is a typical exquisite detail.) The poetic side of Beethoven's genius is thus gently illumined. What is lacking is some sense of the power and reach of Beethoven's arguments, the sense of a man throwing a girdle round the earth. It would be uncharitable to say of this performance, as Wagner said of Mendelssohn's music passim, that the notes flow like water from a public fountain; but the performance is rather light on its feet, and quite quick.
Both Arrau (Philips) and Perahia (CBS) give the first movement a minute or so longer, to transforming effect; and where Zacharias and Vonk dispatch the Adagio, here noticeably con mosso, in just under seven minutes, both Arrau and Perahia wisely allow it eight and a half. Even Kempff, no slouch in his legendary DG performance, now at mid price with the Op. 111 Piano Sonata as a fill-up, is less brisk than Zacharias. I found the slow movement a particular disappointment given the sensibility of much of Zacharias's playing elsewhere.
The EMI recording balances the piano and the Staatskapelle Dresden much as Philips balance the same forces on the Arrau/Davis recording, with a clear but not over-prominent piano image and natural concert hall perspectives for the orchestra, including the winds. Certainly, there is much here to take delight in, not least in the finale which emerges purposeful, refined, and winningly gamesome; but I don't think the performance displaces those of other established masters in this formidably competitive field.