Artur Schnabel’s Beethoven Concerto cycle from the early 1930s has been blessed with several high-quality CD remasterings from Arabesque, Pearl, and, most recently, Naxos. The chief concern for collectors will be how Mark Obert-Thorn’s Naxos transfers stack up to the others. That depends on your taste. For Pearl, Seth Winner opts for brighter piano equalization, which reveals more “ping” to Schnabel’s tone, with slightly more defined note attacks and pedaling details. Yet Obert-Thorn obtains a more judicious orchestra/piano ratio by taming the strident bite of the string tuttis. He also has the advantage of cleaner sources than the 78s used for the Pearl edition. In any case, Schnabel is captured on his finest, loftiest form, both musically and pianistically. Listen, for instance, to his ravishing, pearly scale passages and intense, heavenly trills in the slow movements, or to the incredible vitality and brio that he brings to both concertos’ outer movements. The latter abound with meaningful accents, red-blooded dynamic surges, and harmonically oriented phrasing (for example, the slight rhythmic displacements in the G major concerto’s first-movement development).
The orchestra is well recorded for the era, and Malcolm Sargent’s energetic, sturdy accompaniments belie any notions of him as a mere timebeater. If anything, he provides a more pointed and shapely orchestral framework for Schnabel than he did for either Mark Hambourg or Benno Moiseiwitsch in their respective recordings of the Third Concerto. Under Schnabel’s knowing fingers, the C major Rondo Op. 51 No. 1 is refreshingly brisk and businesslike in the manner of Alfred Brendel’s excellent Vox recording from the early 1960s, and quite different from the lyrically inward Kempff and Arrau editions. Good, perceptive annotations by Nalen Anthoni make this reissue all the more attractive. [7/21/2001]
