Performing Beethoven's early piano concertos

Imagine for a moment that you are the recently appointed music director of a moderately wellendowed symphony orchestra-one that plays on 'modern' instruments. Although no stranger to the standard repertoire, you are conducting much of it for the first time. One of the first two Beethoven piano concertos is scheduled next season, and your soloist is open-minded and eager to apply the latest wisdom; the two of you will have the luxury of a couple of meetings before the first of two full-length orchestral rehearsals. In spite of the sincerity with which you and your teachers have steered clear of the historical performance movement in the past, you no longer find it possible to ignore the glowing reviews that Roger Norrington, John Eliot Gardiner, Christopher Hogwood and others are now receiving. Blissfully unaware of your status as a defensive post-modernist, you resolve to catch up with current thinking about so-called 'authentic performance practice'. But your needs, like those of all performers, are ultimately practical. You want to find the best edition and parts for your orchestra and soloist. What about the scale and range of dynamics? How might you approach the myriad of articulation marks in these scores? What tempos should you employ, and with how much flexibility? You want advice about performing forces and seating plans. How about advising your soloist about cadenzas? You are not ready to take the plunge into period instruments, but you certainly want to know what recordings on them sound like.' You set aside a few hours to dig around in the nearby university library, reasonably confident of extracting answers to your questions. The following exercise outlines what might transpire if this task was undertaken with any earnestness. An early Beethoven concerto is an ideal example by which to measure not only the growing pains of the historical performance movement but also the dilemmas faced increasingly by performers and musical organizations of every persuasion. My thesis is, first, that the scholarly community has done little to address seriously the performer's concerns; second, that when such concerns are addressed, the same evidence is used to reach conflicting conclusions; and finally, that whatever artistic decisions are made, you may expect that the motives behind them as well as the result will be most critically evaluated. Let us consider first the question of the score and parts. Few works in the concerto repertory receive more performances than the five Beethoven piano concertos. Yet the only parts commercially available today continue to be those issued as part of the Breitkopf & Hdirtel Gesamtausgabe [GA] in 1862.2 This is all the more ironic given that a comprehensive new critical edition [BWG] of the first three concertos (op.15, 19, 37), replete with nearly one hundred oversize pages of Kritischer Bericht, was issued by the Beethoven-Archiv in 1984.3 To date, inexplicably, no parts have been made available. Orchestras are, of course, free to purchase the score of the new critical edition and incorporate changes in their old Breitkopf parts. But the changes-assuming for the moment that all of them are desirable-are so extensive that probably not even the world's most prosperous orchestras will find it feasible.