Compared with most opening announcements, this was dramatic: the previous morning the pianist Paul Lewis, due to be the soloist in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, had been hit by a car. Happily he’s expected to make a quick recovery. And the Beethoven went ahead, with Boris Giltburg as a luxury stand-in.
This reunited Giltburg and the conductor Vasily Petrenko, who have recorded all Beethoven’s piano concertos together, and their familiarity smoothed the way to a more polished performance than the circumstances might have suggested. Giltburg, characteristically, played with firm delicacy, dovetailing nicely with the warm-toned orchestra. He threw in the odd thunderous moment but tended more towards understatement, as in the haunting music-box passage of the first movement and the hushed transition to the finale. In that movement he struck a fine balance of grace and exuberance; but his encore, Schumann’s Arabeske in C, seemed calibrated to a more intimate level, Giltburg’s introspective playing making us lean in and listen.
