Beethoven Piano Concertos: Paul Lewis

Paul Lewis and Jiří Bělohlávek on the cover of the original recording of their Beethoven piano concerto performances (from the Amazon.com Web page for this recording)

The second of the three sections in the harmonia mundi box set of performances of the piano music by Ludwig van Beethoven performed by Paul Lewis consists of only three of the fourteen CDs in the collection. These account for the five published piano concertos. All the recordings were made with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jiří Bělohlávek.

While the full extent of the previously discussed piano sonatas provides a useful set of “landmarks” in following Beethoven’s progress as a composer, the piano concertos occupy a much shorter interval in Beethoven’s biography. For those who like to use the string quartets as a “benchmark” for that progress, all five of the concertos fit in the interval that covers both the early and middle period string quartets. Indeed, Opus 37 (the third concerto) in C minor was composed after the publication of the six early quartets and before Beethoven began work on the three quartets written for Count Andrey Razumovsky.

However, there is a good reason why Beethoven abandoned the piano concerto genre after the completion of the Opus 73 (“Emperor”) concerto in E-flat major. The reason was that Beethoven was just as interested in drawing attention to his skills as a pianist as he was in being a composer. All five of the concertos were conceived as platforms to parade the many talents of Beethoven-the-pianist, not only in the notated piano part but also in the diverse and imaginative approaches he took to providing cadenza material. Indeed, one might say that the concertos provided Beethoven with the best opportunities to follow in the footsteps of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in both “theory and practice.”

Unfortunately, the first signs of deafness date all the way back to 1798. As the deafness advanced, Beethoven was still capable of dazzling his Viennese audiences with performances of the first four concertos. However, he was never able to give a public performance of Opus 73; and the premiere of that concerto was performed by his student Carl Czerny. Thus, while the five concertos can be approached as a “miniseries” narrative of the advances of keyboard virtuosity, that narrative comes to an abrupt conclusion when Beethoven has to abandon hopes of performing them before an audience.

Fortunately, neither Lewis nor Bělohlávek approaches this music as a tragic narrative. Indeed, even the only minor-key concerto, Opus 37, maintains a vigorously upbeat rhetoric in which the joy of making music is reflected by an equal joy in listening to its performance. Bear in mind, however, that these are not “historically-informed” performances. The full force of a modern Steinway piano is matched by the full extent of lush sonorities encountered in a large string section. Nevertheless, Bělohlávek is as keen at making sure that the individual lines coming from the wind section consistently reflect this overall rhetoric, while Lewis is free to unleash as many powerful gestures as the score pages are capable of supporting. In the context of my recent article on the Mozart recordings of Bruno Walter, it would be fair to say that Bělohlávek appreciates the Walter tradition and knows how to deliver an account of Beethoven’s orchestral music that justifies continuing it.