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Did we need another recording of Brahms' First Piano Concerto?
Apparently so, for this is easily the freshest recording of the piece currently available. Not only that, but it's my recording of the year so far: it is so engaging that one has to listen again and again, each time discovering something new.
Krystian Zimerman is a pianist in control of his every move, negotiating both the technical complexities and the sensuous lines of the piece. His sense of purpose is easily matched by Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic (on loan from EMI), whose rigorous accompaniment sweeps the dust from every page of the score. It's like hearing the piece for the first time.
The drum roll and aggressive trills in the upper strings make for an arresting opening. When the winds join in with the trills, the orchestral timbre blossoms, followed by more vigour from the strings. All the rumours about Rattle's disastrous relationship with his new orchestra must be untrue, if this recording is anything to go by – they've never sounded better.
After all this turbulence, Zimerman's enters with the piano part, gently understated at first, then climaxing with a repetition of the opening trills and octave leaps. He pushes the tempo around to great effect, but not so much as to undermine the flow of the music. There is so much beauty about the interaction between pianist and orchestra: taking the closing material in the middle of the movement, for example, where the horns are gently calling the music to a brief rest while the piano plays soft, high broken chords. Dynamic contrasts, a singing tone and strong, masculine attack define this performance.
A heady romance that was hinted at in the first movement becomes the primary characteristic of the second. The clarinet part in the introductory section is finely executed, and the Berlin strings play the melody with their unique warmth. Zimerman's sound is remarkable here, playing the main theme lyrically but delicately, and phrasing the complex lines with great sensitivity. At the height of the movement he eschews the temptation to thrash out the thick chords and instead applies more tone, to exciting effect. The wind colours are varied and the Deutsche Grammophon engineers have blended the different components of the ensemble with admirable clarity.
The serene beauty of the slow movement gives way to the biting staccato of the finale. Zimerman simply rips the sliding ornaments from the piano, but the overriding sense of this movement is the baroque-like precision of the performance of certain passages – it's extraordinary. The piano's descending chromatic scales send a shiver down the spine, then the strings introduce a more romantic mood again, to which Zimerman responds with polish. Virtuosic display is never far away, though the cadenza balances this carefully with more musical considerations, and the recording ends with a huge, victorious, Brahmsian flourish.
My only qualm is that, at less than an hour's running time, the CD is a little short – aren't there enough Brahms miniatures for Zimerman to fill up the disc with?
However, this is a minor point, and on one level the performance is so satisfying that no more is needed. It's as spellbinding as recordings get.
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