Vladimir Ashkenazy’s late-1980s Beethoven Concerto cycle gains a new lease on catalog life via Arkivmusic.com’s on-demand reissue program. Although the pianist conducts from the keyboard, the Cleveland Orchestra’s extraordinary precision and judicious balances between and within sections rival many versions led by full-time podium presences. The Clevelanders’ chamber-like ambience and textural transparency markedly contrasts to Solti/Chicago’s massive, sometimes overpowering sonorities in Ashkenazy’s first cycle.
The Fourth concerto’s slow movement most obviously demonstrates these differences: In Chicago the string tuttis materialize like Godzilla in slow motion, leaving the piano to fend for itself. By contrast, a genuine dialogue informs the faster, leaner Cleveland interpretation. Similarly, Solti’s big-boned orchestral framework sacrifices some of the zest and wit of the First and Second concertos’ outer movements, although Ashkenazy’s meticulously articulated runs and ornaments prove more fluid, less heavily accented in Chicago.
The Fourth and Fifth concerto Rondos are more judiciously balanced in Cleveland, but are more dynamic and combative in Chicago, while the Cleveland Third concerto’s finale inspires lighter articulation and more playful melodic inflections. For the record, Ashkenazy plays the shorter of the First concerto’s completed first-movement cadenza, the Fourth’s longer, more commonly heard option (the one favored by Schnabel, Arrau, Fleisher, and Goode), and, in the B-flat concerto’s first movement, an excellent, brilliantly idiomatic cadenza of his own.
More improvisatory abandon would have been welcome in Ashkenazy’s opening unaccompanied solo in the Choral Fantasy, in the manner of Rudolf Serkin, Anton Kuerti, Hélène Grimaud, and Julius Katchen, among my favorites. Once the orchestral variations kick in, abetted by a strong group of soloists and an expertly drilled chorus, the performance comes alive with spirited animation. On balance, this is the most consistently satisfying of Ashekanzy’s three recorded Beethoven concerto cycles.
