The Op.19 is the only one of Beethoven’s piano concertos that can properly be called a work in the High Classical tradition – it was mostly written between 1787 and 1789, when Beethoven was in his teens and well before he started work on what is now known as the 1st Piano Concerto, deploys a small orchestra without any timpani, trumpets, or clarinets, and uses (especially in the first movement) a lot of figuration that could pretty reasonably be called Mozart- or Haydn-like. But it’s also remarkable that even at this early stage, Beethoven was producing moments which really chafed against the classical idiom. The most obvious of this is the rapt “con gran espressione” passage in the slow movement (20:37), which seems to draw a line straight to late Beethoven, but there’s also the lyrical flight at 17:39, and all those accents in the last movement aggressively misplaced in the middle of the beat (22:42; 23:58, 24:55). Even the first movement, which has a typically neat Mozartean structure and a Haydnish profusion of thematic material, features a bunch of unusually intense gestures, such as extended chromatic colour (4:30), the ominous bass oscillation at the end of the development (7:49), and the obsessive diminished 7th harmony at 7:16 – let alone the whole cadenza, which was written down long after most of this was composed.
As usual, Helmchen delivers a superb performance – he really is just incapable of generating an uninteresting texture, and his ability to pull off even the most fleeting and subtle variations of articulation is unparalled among the Beethoven concerto recordings I’ve come across. Some highlights: the rarely-observed but lovely pianissimo at 5:17, the burbling LH at 7:06, the gorgeous slurs at 17:26, the agogic accent on the first note of the syncopated phrase at 22:42, and the way that intensely dramatic LH counterpoint leaps into the foreground at 25:28.
