BRAHMS: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 15 – Stephen Hough, piano/BBC Symphony Orchestra/Andrew Davis – Virgin Classics

 

Recorded 1991, this unassuming budget production packs quite a Brahmsian whollop, neither too brisk nor too inflated in the manner of the post-Glenn Gould/Leonard Bernstein clones. Besides the tumultuous, curiously intimate grace Hough imposes on the Maestoso movement, he renders the Adagio with the tendresses we usually associate with Schumann, although the music certainly could be interpreted as precisely a requiem for that composer. Having seen Andrew Davis conduct in Atlanta, I can appreciate his penchant for clarity of orchestral detail. He raises some colossal goose bumps in the course of the first movement – shades of the fiery way both Reiner and Mitropoulos had with this arch-romantic music. The probing introspection of the second movement, particularly, makes we want more Brahms on this disc; so why EMI could not add the Op. 10 Ballades or the Op. 116 Fantasien as supplement defies my aesthetics and my sense of what sells. 

The last movement Rondo engages in various, moody, metric tugs of war and explosive dynamic shifts, a Beethoven-fest without the unbridled hilarity. More than once, we hear echoes of Bach’s D Minor Concerto, BWV 1052, girded by Hough’s nice applications of the left hand to bring out both subordinate tissue and contrapuntal voices with clarion verve. The beautifully-modulated French horn solo that announces the coda takes us into rounded, interstellar space where even the composer’s emotional reticence cannot contain the high-flying effects of this masterful collaboration. A sleeper maybe, but an impressive document from Stephen Hough and conductor Davis.

— Gary Lemco