Classical reviews – Beethoven: The Piano Concertos and Debussy: Rameau

Polymath Stephen Hough offers a stunning recording of Beethoven’s complete piano concertos, while Iceland’s Vikingur Olafsson conquers two composers with widely contrasting styles. By Michael Church

A new version that does Beethoven's greatness justice

Beethoven: The Piano Concertos

Stephen Hough, piano; Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu

(Hyperion CDA68291/3)

★★★★★

Stephen Hough is a famous polymath. He teaches pianists at the Juilliard School in New York, and he’s produced a best-selling iPad app exposing the mechanics of Liszt’s great Piano Sonata in B Minor. He is also a published poet and novelist, and paints in a bold abstract expressionist style. Moreover, until The Daily Telegraph abolished its blogs, he was one of its most prolific and popular contributors. Now, he’s taking advantage of the current lockdown to finish three compositions he has been commissioned.

In between all of this, he’s releasing a stunning recording of Beethoven’s complete piano concertos. To these great works he makes the most companionable guide, his instinctive good taste saving him from histrionics, and his intuition allowing him to unlock moments of unexpected beauty. Sometimes, these are just fleeting hints, as at the beginning of the development of the first movement of the Fourth, where he gently leads Hannu Lintu and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra into a change of tone and tempo; or the moment of pure stillness which Hough conjures up mid-bar, near the close of the Third’s Largo.

Debussy: Rameau

Vikingur Olafsson, piano

(Deutsche Grammophon 483 7701)

★★★★★

This Icelandic pianist is well-named: two years ago he was unknown in Britain, but he made his entry like a Viking conqueror, and has been dubbed “Iceland’s Glenn Gould”, a sobriquet he well deserves. Last year, he released a Bach CD that swept the board through its exquisite taste and bold originality. Intermingling celebrated transcriptions with some of Bach’s preludes, fugues, inventions, sinfonias, partita movements, and with the A Minor Variations BWV 989 (which form the structural heart of his performance) this CD really does feel like a performance, he created a ravishing musical sequence.

His approach to the works of Debussy and Rameau is based on the radical idea that these composers, despite their profoundly contrasting styles, are brothers under the skin. Both, he says, were revolutionaries, and both possessed a relentless intellectual independence. Both also had a synaesthetic streak.

Olafsson gently rings the changes between these composers, beginning with the archaic grace of Debussy’s “La damoiselle élue” before seguing into a series of Rameau’s 1724 “Pièces de clavecin”, which begins with the ravishingly evocative “Le rappel des oiseaux”, where each bird adds its distinctive sound to the mix. It makes for a very beguiling hour.