Beethoven: Piano Concerto No.4 in G, Op.58 (Lewis)

You’re probably not allowed to say this is the best concerto ever written, but if you did, who would actually bother to seriously contest that claim? I mean, really – the Op.58 is such a miraculous work. It’s kind of an impossible combination of the Waldstein and the last two piano sonatas – it has all the brightness and generosity of the former (semiquaver triplets!), and the lyrical, confessional qualities of the latter (the opening of this concerto, for instance, really seems to occupy the same emotional space as the opening of the Op.110, and the orchestra also gets some lovely contrapuntal writing). Plus the trills in here (and there are lots of them) are amazing – people say the trill reached its apotheosis in Beethoven’s late sonatas, but they make a pretty good case for themselves here.

There have been volumes written about the opening of this concerto, but it’s just one of the most moving things ever written. It’s not just that the piano opens with that intimate, improvised meditation (is there a more terrifying opening to a piano concerto? None really springs to mind) – it’s also how the orchestra enters immediately after in the key of B, not so much having modulated as colouring the piano melody with a kind of otherworldly harmonic brightness (you can even hear the orchestral entry as implying a Gmaj7♯5 kind of sound, which is wild). The whole first movement is packed full of incredible passages – the soaring lyricism of the 3rd theme, the magical entry of the piano, the rapt excursions of the development (7:39; 9:09), the hair-raising trill that ends the 1st movement cadenza (16:39). Structurally, it’s also very efficiently put together (another late-Beethoven trait); the opening’s 4-note pulse bookends the 1st movement, which is littered with almost unnoticeable callbacks to earlier material (compare 7:39 and 3:12). And then, of course, you have lots of fun textural stuff (the dissonances at 4:45) and harmonic innovation (the theme at 1:11 deceives at every turn).

The 2nd movement is the probably most emotionally concentrated movement in all Beethoven’s piano concerti – only 3 pages long, but a tight knot of despair tightly wedged between two luminous movements. It doesn’t really have a structure to speak of – instead, it’s really a series of dialogues between piano and strings (the rest of the orchestra remains silent throughout), with the piano and orchestra gradually converging on a kind of common language of grief. The agonizing trills in this movement will be re-purposed in the last movement to exhilarating effect.

The last movement opens with a deft trick – the theme enters with a repeated C chord that’s quickly established in m.6 (when the F♯ arrives) to really be the IV of G in m.6. But when the piano enters, it introduces an F♮, confirming that we really *are* in C, before immediately modulating to G. This use of IV colour plays a big part in giving this movement its sunny lyricism – there’s also something a little funny in how often Beethoven builds into these massive G7 passages (25:17; 32:47) in order to prepare for the theme’s entry in C, only to immediately modulate away once C is reached. The first episode in this movement (24:29) is also pretty striking – it’s in two-part counterpoint, but the voices are spaced very far apart (another late-Beethovenism), and float above a cello pedal on D. There is also some lovely colouration with a ♭6, giving the passage a mystic breadth – plus the whole thing is followed up by some beautifully warm counterpoint in the orchestra, especially the woodwinds.

Lewis, accompanied by the BBCSO (under Belohlávek) puts in one of my favourite performances of this work. Because the Op.58 has become over time so wrapped up in associations of profundity/spirituality etc., many performers feel pressured into finding some kind of magic dust in the work (sometimes to great effect), but Lewis shows here that playing in an unassuming, expansive manner can work wonders too. I think this kind of playing is especially well-suited to the Op.58 because it has such a personal character – sure, the opening chords are notoriously hard to interpret, and you can spend hours figuring out how to voice and articulate them, but at the end of the day the most important thing is that they sound sincere, artifice-free, full of breath – and they are, after all that, just G major chords. It’s hard to pick out specific moments in Lewis’ playing that stand out – his eye is really on the big arc here, and although he doesn’t at all ignore Beethoven’s markings he doesn’t go out of his way to accentuate them either – this is very much in the “the music’s good enough to speak for itself” school of interpretation. Nonetheless, several things do stand out – the mystery in the first movement’s development, the violence of the trills in the second movement and stillness of the piano’s final entries, and the beautifully shaped episodes and fiery cadenza in the last.

Видео Beethoven: Piano Concerto No.4 in G, Op.58 (Lewis) канала Ashish Xiangyi Kumar