Beethoven: Piano Concertos / Jan Lisiecki (5LP)

The Canadian star pianist Jan Lisiecki was highly praised by the press for his successful album with Felix Mendelssohn's Piano Concertos 1 and 2: "an impressive technique allied to a musical sensibility that is poetic, sensitive and even understated" (Washington Post). Now he is releasing his new album with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields on Deutsche Grammophon: Beethoven - Complete Piano Concertos at the beginning of the Beethoven Year 2020. The pianist does not see the five concertos as a cycle in the strict sense: "Beethoven certainly did not conceive these works as a coherent whole. Nevertheless, they belong together because they show an incredibly differentiated picture of the composer, starting with the first two concertos, which still reveal Mozart's legacy, through the very different works numbers three and four to the majestic E flat major concerto." Lisiecki is fascinated by this variety, "because all of Beethoven's important, sometimes contradictory facets come together here". Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto in particular has a very special significance for Jan Lisiecki: in 2013, he stepped in at short notice with the Orchestra Mozart Bologna under Claudio Abbado after Martha Argerich had to cancel, and four years later made his debut with the same work at Carnegie Hall with The Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin. The pianist's top priority for this recording was musical clarity. "Only then can a listener understand Beethoven's music as the sum of different ideas." This makes this album a milestone at the beginning of the Beethoven year 2020 and shows once again that Lisiecki has long since earned a place at the top of the classical music world.