Beethoven/ Lauma Skride - Beethoven: Overture The Consecration of the House Piano Concerto No. 4

The Brandenburg Symphony Orchestra took advantage of the restrictive time without an audience and an outstanding soloist for a new production with an exquisite Beethoven recital: the overture "The Consecration of the House" is followed by the 4th Piano Concerto with a once again fantastic Lauma Skride, who also contributes to the listening pleasure with the rarely heard Variations in C minor WoO 80. As a bonus, the second album contains an intellectual and linguistic highlight: Peter Gülke and Alfred Brendel discuss Schubert, Beethoven and the art of interpretation. The beginning of the Piano Concerto No. 4 is unique: instead of a showy and determined start, Beethoven begins with a downright flippant prelude; piano and orchestra are far apart, find each other only with difficulty, and the composer completely denies the soloist essential parts of the thematic material. Lauma Skride and the Brandenburg Symphony Orchestra celebrate the autobiographical loneliness of the deafened virtuoso, which takes on desperate forms in the second movement, in a touching way - even the finale's gut-wrenching moments are not free of the mood of the beginning. Beethoven based the C minor Variations on an extremely unwieldy theme. And he treats it with extreme rigor; the relentlessness with which he sticks to the formal structure of the theme as well as to the fundamental tone is very reminiscent of a passacaglia. Only at the very end does the composer free himself from the corset, before the work fades away in pianissimo.