Brahms / Strauss – Joseph Moog

   in Piano International (Mar, 2018)
Competition in Brahms’ Second Concerto is extremely fierce: Presto Classical’s website lists 383 recordings besides this newcomer. Moog and Nicholas Milton – who previously collaborated on a fine disc of Rachmaninov’s Third and Rubinstein’s Fourth Concertos – take an expansive view of the work, running in at around 48-and-a- half minutes overall, three minutes beyond booklet annotator Jeremy Nicholas’ comment that ‘a typical performance is 45 minutes’! There is nothing typical in the opening Allegro non troppo, though I found Moog’s playing a little mannered in places and a touch hard-edged. There is little of the luminous intimacy that Stephen Hough and Mark Wigglesworth recently brought to the music on Hyperion. …