Beethoven: Piano Concerto No.3 in Cm, Op.37 (Minnaar)

Beethoven’s most concentrated and dramatic piano concerto. What’s amazing about it is not just that its themes are so powerfully built, but that the whole structure of the piece is designed to maximise the sense of drama across all three movements. For a start, the Beethoven packs the orchestral exposition with so much material that that the piano isn’t left with any truly new theme to introduce in its own exposition. Instead Beethoven uses this opportunity to enact some very neat thematic transformation – 0:15 becomes 3:47, and 1:05 becomes 4:31 – which gives the movement a sense of continuous development, but also a terse, almost hungry feel. Then there’s the motivic development of the work – the march-like motif in mm.3-4 practically dominates the development section (starting at 7:38), but is nearly completely absent from the otherwise hyper-dramatic cadenza. The reason for this is revealed when (m.march) enters in the timpani at the end of the cadenza – this is the first time Beethoven really tries to turn the cadenza’s ending into something really magical, an effect enhanced here by how quietly the cadenza ends, and how the piano continues playing after the orchestra enters (it’s much more usual for the orchestra to come in with a big tutti, while the piano falls silent). In hindsight, you can almost imagine that Beethoven wrote (m.march) with the timpani in mind, and deliberately withheld us hearing it in its most natural form until just before the end of the movement.

The way keys are used here is also crucial to the narrative of the work – the 2nd movement is in E, which sounds coolly ethereal compared to the Cm of the 1st movement. But it also integrates references to Cm – most obviously the sudden transition to G at 17:53, but also the wonderful C chord which emerges at 18:05, barely kept aloft by the E/C tremolo thrumming below. The transition from the distant E to the Cm of the third movement is also masterfully handled – the 2nd movement ends with a G# at the top of the harmony, which is then interpreted as an Ab in the first note of the rondo. And the rondo itself exploits this common tone – at 30:09 in the rondo, Beethoven first turns a G to an Ab in the orchestra, and then the Ab to a G# in the piano, ushering in a gorgeous developmental episode in E. It’s by far the most fun modulation Beethoven pulls off in all the concertos, and a wonderful example of how key relations can be used *simultaneously* for large-scale dramatic ordering between movements, and also for in-the-moment colour.

Minnaar and the Netherlands SO (led by de Vriend) are excellent here – the NSO’s razzy valveless brass adds a lot colour to a concerto that really benefits from such a fierce texture (see 25:57 and similar). Minnaar’s playing is actually surprisingly expressive for a concerto that’s gained a (reasonable) reputation for being rather merciless in its outer movements. At 4:31, for instance, the transition theme is taken with a detached LH and a very free RH – the way the legato line slinks across the beats is just beautiful. Minnaar also takes the descending passage at 30:54 very softly when it’s usually played forte, which makes the dominant prolongation actually feel a lot more tense than it usually does. Plus the phrasing in the concerto’s hair-raising quiet moments is wonderful (the 40 seconds or so starting from 7:52), there are some nice colour changes (the LH at 10:59, just barely texturing the RH), and sometimes a lovely bit of startling articulation pops to the fore (21:26). The tempo choices here are also work pretty well – the 2nd mvt is taken at a rather classical clip, making it unusually warm and vigorous, and the 3rd is slower than usual, which impacts a real sense of menace.

Видео Beethoven: Piano Concerto No.3 in Cm, Op.37 (Minnaar) канала Ashish Xiangyi Kumar