This live recording contains not the later music-making of Austrian bad-boy pianist
Friedrich Gulda (what other pianist faked his own death?), but music from early in his career, when he was a newly minted prodigy in the decade after World War II. As annotator Gottfried Kraus points out in his rather too Germanic booklet notes (in what way, pray tell, was Austria's musical tradition "inviolate" in 1953), that prodigy status itself helps explain the vicissitudes of
Gulda's career.
Gulda's playing fell firmly within Viennese boundaries at this point, but even here he produced fresh performances not modeled too closely on those of any of his Austrian contemporaries in these two
Beethoven concertos. The most striking feature of these performances is that
Gulda conducted the
Vienna Symphony from the keyboard, something not terribly common in 1953, and certainly not in
Beethoven. In an era of oversize
Beethoven performances,
Gulda forges very nice music of chamber dimensions, with sensitive coordination between soloist and ensemble. His performances are notable for the way they manage to create some quite striking effects while maintaining a decorous exterior. Tune in to the end of the exposition in the first movement of the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58, and consider what
Gulda does as the development unrolls. It may seem as though he is taking more tempo liberties than he actually does -- it's just that he has the chops to create an atmosphere of mystery through texture and articulation alone. The concerto's slow movement is done straightforwardly enough, but the strange dialogue between the inexorably stomping orchestra and the melancholic piano emerges very sharply. In the Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, Op. 15, and in the G major concerto finale,
Gulda's liquid technique is an attraction in itself. These performances were recorded for the Rot-Weiß-Rot radio station operated by the American occupation forces in Vienna, and the sound, while a bit hollow, is pretty advanced for the time, and it's a fair bet that even
Gulda fans won't have heard these performances. They, and lovers of historical performances in general, will richly enjoy this document from Germany's Orfeo label.