Previously released as three individual volumes, Ingrid Jacoby’s Beethoven Concerto cycle with Jacek Kaspszyk and the Sinfonia Varsovia is now bundled together at a special price. From the start, one notices that Kaspszyk elicits disciplined playing from his chamber-sized forces, with plenty of dynamic contrast and timbral diversity in the form of pungent brass interjections, scurrying woodwind tuttis, and strong timpani presence. The collective strings phrase as with one mind, if not with the crispness and agility we hear from David Zinman and the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra.
Compare, for example, the latter’s stunningly playful virtuosity in the Fourth concerto’s Rondo alongside Kaspszyk’s relatively matter-of-fact reading, or notice the First concerto Allegro con brio’s first-movement second subject, so beautifully inflected by the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Ivan Fischer, yet parked in neutral here. This is partly due to the reverberant and slightly diffuse orchestral image. By contrast, Jacoby’s piano is positioned forward in the mix. The disparity of balance particularly hits home in slow movements, which otherwise are well sustained and sensitively shaped.
Furthermore, Jacoby’s neat and symmetrical pianism sometimes lacks the nuance, inflection, and harmonic awareness demonstrated by pianists as different as Schnabel, Fleisher, Kempff, Arrau, Serkin, Goode, and Bronfman. In the Second concerto, for instance, Jacoby is unduly reticent in the wild first-movement cadenza, and underplays the Rondo’s offbeat accents that Fleisher relishes. And she rattles off the First concerto Rondo’s main theme without giving any special profile to the slurs, as Goode, Arrau, and Fleisher do.
However, Jacoby’s tone opens up and her attention to detail sharpens in the Third concerto, where her fiery first-movement cadenza is anything but held back. Her suave, rippling passagework and double notes in the Fourth concerto’s Allegro moderato evoke Gieseking’s similar approach, while the scales that pass back and forth between soloist and orchestra in the development section of the “Emperor” first movement come alive with color and mystery.
ICA fills out disc three with the contents of Jacoby’s 1992 Carlton Classics solo Beethoven release, save for the Eroica Variations. She treads heavily and slowly through the Andante favori, adding nearly two minutes to Sviatoslav Richter’s far suppler and more fluid account, and waxes prosaic in the two variation sets, in contrast to the elegant transparency of Hänssler’s Florian Uhlig. Similarly, Jacoby softens the Op. 119 Bagatelles’ quirky turns of phrase and uncouth edges; go to Rudolf Serkin, Alfred Brendel, and Stephen Kovacevich for the real, unvarnished deal. In sum, a Beethoven concerto cycle that’s often admirable, if not always memorable.
