Blown away (Gilels/Jochum)
This happens very rarely indeed.
I’m sitting here at my kitchen table, innocently writing some stuff and listening to an internet radio station playing the first Brahms concerto — music I know inside out. All of a sudden it hits me how extraordinary this particular rendering is — and I’m listening just through my PowerBook’s speakers.
My reference record for this has always been Pollini and Abbado. But I was blown away by this one: it made me realize how inadequate Pollini is, not at any technical level but in his interpretation. The soundfile doesn’t give me much info beyond “Gilels,” but a cursory glance at this page suggests that this is most likely the Gilels and Jochum record with the Berlin Philharmonic — two artists I never particularly cared about. (I always thought Gilels was too muscular, but perhaps that’s not bad for the Brahms warhorse.) This stuff is probably more than thirty years old and sounds better than any other recording I’ve heard.
