Kristian Bezuidenhout/Irish Chamber Orchestra review: Interpretative quirks too often interrupt Beethoven piano concertos' natural flow

Irish Times

23-06-2025

Kristian Bezuidenhout/Irish Chamber Orchestra
Whyte Recital Hall, RIAM, Dublin
★★★☆☆
It's all change at the Irish Chamber Orchestra. The Austrian violinist and conductor Thomas Zehetmair is being succeeded as artistic partner by the Norwegian violinist and composer Henning Kraggerud in September. And the South African-born keyboard player and conductor Kristian Bezuidenhout, who trained in Australia and the US and now lives in London, has been named the orchestra's associate artist. (Those job titles are so confusing that the orchestra's website also refers to Bezuidenhout its 'current Artist in Association'.)
Bezuidenhout is no stranger to Ireland, having first performed here as a teenager back in 1998. He made his first appearances with the ICO in 2006, when he played both harpsichord and piano in concertos by Hertel and Mozart. His current ICO project is a cycle of the Beethoven piano concertos, directed from the keyboard, using a lidless Steinway concert grand. Tonight he plays the second and fourth concertos.
Bezuidenhout is one of those players who bring the sensitivities and concerns of the world of period performance style to their work with modern instruments. In the dry acoustic of the Royal Irish Academy of Music's Whyte Recital Hall this makes for performances of great clarity and immediacy, though the textures do at times become a little cluttered, so that the strongest instruments are allowed to overpower those of lighter tone.
His piano playing matches the high energy and vivid communication of his conducting. His approach is so articulate that intricate score markings that are often hardly discernible in performance can stand out with the musical equivalent of perfect elocution. We're talking here about the slurring of pairs of notes in rapid passages, the impeccable cleanness of virtuosic flourishes, and a general feeling in fast movements of high spirits unimpeded by stress.
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In my experience Bezuidenhout's approach sometimes lean towards a kind of interpretative detailing that can seem intrusive. This can go beyond the often stimulating hits and misses from added embellishments, whether spontaneous or premeditated, into areas that can seem hard to justify based on what's in the composers' scores.
The balancing of these issues is altogether more persuasive in the Second Piano Concerto than in the Fourth, where the orchestra is prone to sound too pressured, and Bezuidenhout's fondness for spaced-out arpeggiation is inflicted even on the poise of the solo piano phrase that opens this work.
Bezuidenhout is not the first player to arpeggiate the opening chord. On disc the practice can be traced back at least as far as Steven Lubin's 1987 recording with the Academy of Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood. And the idea seems to have originated with the Beethoven pupil Carl Czerny, who proposed it in the mid-19th century, some decades after the composer's death.
In the ICO performance it is definitely a case of 'Tain't What You Do (It's the Way That You Do It), with Bezuidenhout's interpretative quirks too often interrupting the natural flow of the music in spite of the otherwise often refined delivery.