top
Home Labels Contact
Piano Concertos nos. 1 & 2
Ludwig van Beethoven

Piano Concertos nos. 1 & 2

Hannes Minnaar / Jan Willem de Vriend / The Netherlands Symphony Orchestra

Label: Challenge Classics
Format: SACD
Barcode: 0608917271225
barcode
Catalog number: CC 72712
Releasedate: 03-02-16
- Second volume in the ongoing series of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos with Hannes Minnaar, Jan Willem de Vriend and Netherlands Symphony Orchestra.

- Magazine Crescendo welcomed first volume with such words: "Rarely these two war horses sound so "freed", so pinpoint accurate, so aerial beautiful and so visinoary modern."

- Hannes Minnaar is surely among the most interesting and sought after pianists of his generation.
Before we listen to the young Dutch pianist Hannes Minnaar play Beethoven’s first two piano concertos, it is perhaps interesting to see how another young pianist may have played them once, long ago – a German who lived in Vienna, a headstrong and temperamental genius. His name? Ludwig van Beethoven. His pupil, the famous composer of etudes and sensitive observer Carl Czerny, once described his playing: “[...] characterised by passionate strength, alternated with all the charm of a smooth cantabile. The expressiveness is often intensified to extremes, particularly when the music tends towards humour [...] Passages become extremely daring by use of the pedal [...] His playing does not possess that clean and brilliant elegance of certain other pianists. On the other hand, it was spirited, grand and, especially in the adagio, filled with emotion and romanticism.” Strength. Smoothness. Humour. Focus on these aspects and you will come close to Beethoven. Minnaar, De Vriend and The Netherlands Symphony Orchestra play the concertos in reverse order: first 2, then 1.Artistically, it is highly defensible: introduced as it were by the more balanced, more modest Piano Concerto no. 2, no. 1 radiates all the more festiveness (trumpets, clarinets and tympani have come to join the orchestra). Perhaps the lovely, gentle, almost feminine B flat major of Concerto no. 2 would not have been able to hold its own after the male and martial C major. But there is something else. You see, Piano Concerto no. 2 actually came first. It was composed earlier, at least in its initial version.