For 19th-century audiences Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 was the most loved of all his piano concertos, a work in which the balancing of high drama, tenderness, lyricism and humour is most pronounced and in which a coda resolves inner tensions with brilliance and triumphant grandeur. Piano Concerto No. 4 is the most introspective and poetic of the concertos. The simplicity of its opening piano statement gives way to an unprecedented dialogue in the central movement between a heartfelt piano and an austere unison string orchestra, before the infectious energy of the dramatic finale.
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Reviews
International Classical Music Award 2024 Nomination in the Concertos category
International Classical Music Awards 2024
*** Good Album
Thomas Deschamps – Classica magazine (France) – July/August 2023
Interpretation ***** Sound **** Repertoire ****
Anja Renczikowski – Piano News (Germany) – July/August 2023
“… the concerto [No. 3] seems lighter than usual, and Petrenko joins him in more clipped phrasing and greater dynamic contrast than we normally hear. Yet pianist and conductor seem of one mind. Nothing sounds forced or wilful, and nothing seems to be a tug of war between two disparate wills battling for supremacy…”
Alan Becker – American Record Guide – July/August 2023
“… Giltburg’s erudite, informative and vividly expressed booklet notes brilliantly toe a line between the scholarly and the personal. There’s no question that Giltburg and Petrenko’s Beethoven cycle proudly holds its own next to superb recent versions …”
Jed Distler – Gramophone magazine – April 2023
Performance **** Recording ****
“… Petrenko has the orchestra sounding rich and substantial but that doesn’t preclude some crisply exuberant playing in the finales, or some appealingly open-sounding woodwind …”
Erica Jeal – BBC Music magazine – April 2023
“… So we have here two very personal, immediately spontaneous and highly dramatic interpretations of the two concertos, in which so many things sound excitingly new. And that makes us recommend these pianistically and orchestrally magnificent recordings without hesitation.” ****
Remy Franck – Pizzicato.lu – 10 February 2023
Album of the Weekend
Classic FM Radio - 6 Februrary 2023
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