Martin Helmchen, Andrew Manze & DSO Berlin - Beethoven: Piano Concerto 3 - Triple Concerto - The Times

You couldn’t go wrong either with the pianist Martin Helmchen, whose previous release in his Beethoven concerto series recently earned him a Gramophone award. The present issue, the finale, features Concerto No 3 and the Triple Concerto, both performed in the athletic, thoughtful and unpretentious manner that makes Helmchen performances so agreeable.

Other pleasures keep pouring out from Andrew Manze’s bouncy direction of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. Perhaps there is more to explore in the concerto’s furthest depths, but the relaxed pleasures of the Triple Concerto, with Antje Weithaas’s violin and Marie-Elisabeth Hecker’s cello, are wonderfully fulfilled.