This Friday, Analekta is publishing a second volume of piano concertos by Charles Richard-Hamelin, Les Violons du Roy and Jonathan Cohen. It closely follows the musical testament of Lars Vogt, two concertos published by Ondine. Two important and very personal proposals for the pianists who recorded them.
After a volume of Concertos No. 22 and 24, Mozart’s two most pre-Beethovenian ones, in January 2020, Charles Richard-Hamelin and Jonathan Cohen return to us with the Concertos No. 20 And 23.
In the acknowledgments of the booklet a few names discreetly remind us that this CD required a socio-financing campaign. The fact that the nectar of what is done here must be reduced to begging in order to exist, while the profession is marked with aid and subsidies, could justify a post-mortem…
What is striking, musically, is the aesthetic logic in relation to the first volume, that is, to use our 2020 terms, the association of a “modern piano with an orchestra which simulates a so-called “historically informed” game, reduced numbers making a very parsimonious, even non-existent, use of vibrato.”
Alchemies
The natural balance problems of this prerogative are positively managed by the microphones, which give substance to the orchestra, while the artistic approach, now balanced, is distinguished by the cadences composed by Charles Richard-Hamelin for the 20e Concerto and its voluble ornamentation of the slow movement of the 23e.
Concerning the cadences, the audacity is all the greater than that, usual, of the 1er movement of 20e is by Beethoven. He takes up the challenge, but does not reach the verve of André Previn for the 3e shutter, despite a similar start.
The success in “the alchemy of the modern and the ancient” is the same as in 2020, even if Cohen, a very attentive accompanist, is not a Mozartian overflowing with tenderness and human warmth.
Lars Vogt’s CD, which appears a year after his death in September 2022, presents him playing and conducting his Paris Chamber Orchestra. The recording of Concertos No. 9 And 24 dates from April 2021, two months after his cancer diagnosis.
The orchestral weight is greater, the piano with a lot of verve and light, a light born from momentum and phrasing, with a finesse of touch which unfolds more and more in the 24e Concerto. Ironically, or by design, the program juxtaposes the life force of Concerto “Young Man” and the fatal weight of C minor of 24e.
In this Mozart awaiting a miracle, Vogt never dwells on his fate (this would have been easy in the slow, very vocal movement of the 9e Concerto) and makes the light of Mozart triumph under his fingers. But the density, weight and harmonic saturation of 24e Concertolike these little suspended moments and the desperate nostalgia of the slow movement, do not deceive and touch our hearts.