Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Buy this for Beethoven’s beguiling arrangements of British folk songs

The recording of the Triple Concerto is decent but it's Gerald Finley's singing that really sells the album

issue 06 July 2024

Grade: B+

Beethoven was proud of his Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello, Piano, pointing out that no one else had attempted such an experiment. He was writing at the height of his youthful powers and the work is stuffed with earworms. Yet I can’t think of any later composers who copied that particular model, and you can’t blame them. This is essentially a concerto for piano trio and full orchestra – not an easy combination, because the soloists keep having to pass the baton to each other while bracing themselves for the next orchestral tutti.

Nicola Benedetti, Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Benjamin Grosvenor make a really good job of it; Kanneh-Mason’s cello glows as memorably as it did in his Elgar Cello Concerto. But they don’t quite manage the miraculous give-and-take of Gil Shaham, Anne Gastinel and the late Nicholas Angelich, whose bouncy precision almost erases any doubts about the wisdom of Beethoven’s experiment.

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