If you’re looking for a budget-priced Brahms D minor Concerto, consider this one. It’s played with distinction, forethought, care, and real individuality. The tumultuous first movement is sculpted with broad, rhetorical brush strokes yet never sags under its weight. Credit Antoni Wit, who takes great care to shape and clarify the composer’s difficult-to-balance orchestration. Idil Biret channels her considerable technique toward musical ends, and admirably integrates the first movement’s taxing chains of trills, descending octave thunderbolts, and upward scale passages into the orchestral fabric. Similarly, Biret and Wit take their sweet time as they transform the slow movement into a cosmic dialogue, capped by a shattering climax. After that, the Rondo almost seems like an anticlimax, but Biret’s solid pianism and Wit’s buoyant opulence is nothing to sneeze at.
Neither is the incisive, thrillingly played Schumann Introduction and Concert Allegro. Biret makes the knotty piano writing both roar and soar, recalling Rudolf Serkin’s leonine, compact traversal with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. In turn, Wit’s spirited podium work keeps the music’s diffuse form afloat, seasoned with the same highly characterized solo playing that grace this conductor’s wonderful Schumann symphonies on Naxos. A release well worth hearing.
