Collectors familiar with the ample elegance and scrupulous technical authority of Claudio Arrau’s Beethoven concerto recordings will find exactly that in these previously unpublished live concert performances from 1957. For his part, Otto Klemperer conducts with greater thrust and vigor than he did in his studio recordings with Daniel Barenboim almost a decade later. However, the murky, dynamically restricted sound quality drastically reduces the impact of his forwardly balanced winds, especially in regard to crucial solo lines (the bassoon passages in the Third and Fifth Concertos’ opening movements). In other words, the publication of these performances neither helps nor hinders the artists’ reputations, in contrast, say, to their 1954 Chopin E minor concerto collaboration.
The rhetorical touches characterizing Arrau’s Philips recordings of Beethoven’s Op. 78 and Op. 110 sonatas manifest themselves less extremely in his late-1950s EMI studio traversals. As a result, the F-sharp sonata’s finale makes a more animated impression, if not on the humorous level conveyed by Kempff’s caustic phrasing or Gould’s brash, rabble-rousing fingerwork. And Arrau is less inclined to push and pull Op. 110’s Arioso, although he still takes time to clarify the frequently blurred first-movement left hand runs and the fugue’s taxing rotary passages. Testament’s remastering of Op. 110 supercedes the one released in EMI’s deleted five-disc Arrau/Beethoven compilation, from which Op. 78 was omitted.
