Brahms: Piano Concerto No 1; Liszt: Trois Odes Funèbres CD review – Zoltan Kocsis at his best

The release of these studio recordings, made in Hungary this summer, must have been planned well before Zoltan Kocsis’s death in November. Their appearance now, though, provides a fine memorial to a musician who was much better known, in Britain at least, as a superlative pianist than as a conductor.

The pairing of works is a curious one. The sleeve notes – more on which later – offer no explanation as to why one of Brahms’s best known scores should be yoked in a two-disc set with three orchestral laments by Liszt from 1866 that are rarely heard in concerts. The two composers were hardly stylistic soul mates, and the works have little in common.

The soloist in the concerto is Sándor Falvai, much admired in his native Hungary apparently, but little known in the UK. His playing seems assertive and perhaps just a little too blunt at times, in a take-it-or-leave-it way, though that approach suits Brahms’s D minor Concerto rather better that it would the Second, in B flat major. There’s not much radiance in Falvai’s playing, but he’s given a perfect dramatic framework by Kocsis’s sculpting of the orchestral accompaniment in bold, strong lines. On this showing, the Hungarian National Philharmonic is a responsive orchestra, if not always a particularly refined one.

But it’s the performance of the Odes Funèbres that shows the power and eloquence of Kocsis’s conducting at its best. The first two were the composer’s intensely personal responses to the deaths of two of his children; the third was inspired by the posthumous reputation of the poet Tasso, and by the idea that memories outlast the life of an individual. Kocsis’s readings have a dark hued, implacable fierceness about them; his belief in this music is unmistakable.

The sound quality is adequate but not special, and for the Liszt pieces, Ilan Volkov’s superb 2011 Hyperion recording remains my first choice. That disc is also more handily documented too. The note in this Celestial Harmonies set is nothing less than an abridged academic thesis – 40 pages of it, complete with footnotes; well worth reading, but not quite what you need with a CD.