New review of Beethoven Vol 2!

Piano Concerto No. 2 and 3 by Ludwig van Beethoven
Artist Niklas Sivelöv, piano, Orquesta Filharmonica de Bogotá, Joachim Gustafsson, conductor
Classic
Music company AMC/Naxos
Year 2024
In recent years, Niklas Sivelöv has done what most pianists dream of. He has thrown himself into the repertoire he loves and recorded it on disc. All of Bach’s piano works are the mainstay, but the first and last piano sonatas of Beethoven suggest that a complete series of works may be in the works. The key to this productivity: the record label he himself is behind sets no limits.

The big project now is Beethoven’s piano concertos, which started in 2022 with the fourth and oddly enough a version of the violin concerto with piano as solo instrument (not for purists perhaps, but it is Beethoven’s own version).

Here a rather fantastic element enters the picture: the orchestra is the Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra. A background to this surprising Swedish-Colombian connection is that Joachim Gustafsson has been chief conductor there since 2021, voted for by an orchestra that is among the leading in South America. In other words: when the symphony orchestras in Sweden can only extend to occasional commissions for Swedish conductors, a really good orchestra in Colombia could be the solution.

Sivelöv is a pianist who strives for perfection, also when it comes to the material conditions. Admittedly, he doesn’t have his favorite grand piano shipped around like Benedetti Michelangeli once did, but apparently it took a whole day to find the perfect piano chair in Bogotá for the first recording. The Italian once canceled a concert just because cold air had entered the concert hall, while Sivelöv in Bogotá limited himself to having the grand piano re-tuned several times before he was satisfied.

Sometimes perfection is an obstacle. Not in the case of Sivelöv. It is true that his extreme sense of touch and inventive mobility can have more scope without an orchestra, but he definitely also has the soloist’s power and delivery. Attack is found in his entrance to the C minor concerto on the new record, poetic power in the slow movement and rhythmic life in the finale. A second concerto is on the disc, number 2 in B-flat major, and there both soloist and orchestra show how musicianship can have free space even in a work that has ended up in the shadows of the three grander ones, numbers 3–5.

Just in the second concert, it is clear how everything is flapping between the conductor and the orchestra. If any element is peculiar to the Bogotá Philharmonic, it is the rhythmic vigor. Sure, sonorously it’s exactly as it should be, and there’s a clear sense of the big form, but the vitality of the rhythm is so palpable. (The fact that the inserted Egmont overture becomes more melancholic than tragic must be placed in parentheses.)

A new Beethoven cycle rivals that much. Alfred Brendel and Radu Lupu are among my favorites, but in the digital era the past becomes almost overpowering. More or less time-honored interpretations with hammer claves have been added. In the Nordics in recent times there are Leif Ove Andsnes and Olli Mustonen.

But Sivelöv retains his hypersensitive distinctiveness here and the Bogotá orchestra under Gustafsson becomes a new, very rewarding acquaintance – for those who did not happen to hear them at the Tommie Haglund festival in Halmstad, where they were guests in 2022 and are planned for 2025. Today the center and periphery undeniably dissolved concepts.

Erik Wallrup

Svenska Dagbladet