Here are two very personal, immediately spontaneous and highly dramatic interpretations of the two concertos, in which so many things sound excitingly new.

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.

REVIEW:

Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto is a departure into a new era. And that’s what Boris Giltburg makes us feel in his interpretation with the Liverpool Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko. His first movement is very agitated and rhetorical, and the Largo is not a beautiful romance, but rather a reflection and lingering, a recharging of the batteries, so to speak, whose energy is used up in the last movement. On the whole, the contrasts are highly dramatic. Orchestra and pianist sometimes seem to want to go in directly opposite directions.

Excitement and contrasts between orchestra and piano also characterize the first movement of the Fourth Concerto in which Giltburg makes the cadenza particularly exciting and expressive. The second movement ends enormously sombre and hopeless, the Passagio experience is fearfully depicted. The last movement is jubilant and fluttering, extremely virtuosic and ravishing in its exalted manner.

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.

-- Pizzicato

Click here to listen to the Naxos podcast interview with Paul Jacobs about this release.

This release features organ concertos by some of America's finest contemporary composers: Horatio Parker's 'imposing and brilliant' piece is heard alongside Christopher Rouse's concerto of contrasting light and dark sonorities, which is dedicated to album soloist Paul Jacobs, and Wayne Oquin's Resilience reflects the human capacity for tenacity and perseverance. The program ends with Ives' Variations on 'America' for solo organ.

The doyen of Australian guitarists, Timothy Kain, has always encouraged the creation of vibrant new music for the instrument and has worked closely over the years with the four composers presented here. In Richard Charlton’s ‘Sonata of Forgotten Dreams,’ non-standard tunings allow cascade-like harmonics to infuse the music, while Mark Isaacs contrasts jazz-like chords with classical color in Five Bagatelles. Phillip Houghton’s ‘The Goldfish Suite’ brings iridescent color and atmosphere, and ‘Mosstrooper Peak’ is Nigel Westlake’s alternately reflective and energetic solo piece evoking remote locations on the country’s east coast, shrines to the memory of his son.