The title for one of my prized Grateful Dead albums, Live/Dead, applies to this Beethoven concerto coupling: live performances, dead music making. You want proof? Listen to the rigidly-held deliberation in the Third Concerto's opening ritornello, the orchestra's listless phrasing in the slow movement, and solo winds that wilt like wallflowers when they should be active and conversational (the oboe in the Rondo, for instance). Valery Afanassiev's cumbrous pianism represents the Teutonic Beethoven school at its pounding nadir, as the first-movement cadenza and much of the Rondo bear out. Afanassiev's rhythmic gear-shifts in the Emperor Concerto's unaccompanied piano solos serve no structural, rhetorical, or expressive purpose other than to be "different". No doubt this factors in with the outer movements' progressive dragging. Has the Rondo's uplifting opening theme ever sounded so labored and devoid of drama? The pianist's slow-moving notes in the Adagio emerge as static satellites in an airless environment rather than as pearls in a starry constellation. In a market glutted with great Beethoven playing of all stylistic stripes, these truly boring performances don't even begin to compete.

--Jed Distler