About Beethoven – Piano Concerto No. 5

Listen to Lang Lang —— BEETHOVEN: Piano Concerto No. 5 on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH63RKQ7OEw
Read “The best way to understand a Beethoven concerto? From a musician’s point of view.” on https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/the-best-way-to-understand-a-beethoven-concerto-from-a-musicians-point-of-view/2019/02/15/133712f0-2ee4-11e9-813a-0ab2f17e305b_story.html?utm_term=.025a42863d3f
And quote:
Every work of orchestral music is a mosaic of myriad considerations, thoughts, phrasings and experiences in performance. This concerto used to be perceived as monumental (listen to the George Szell recording with Leon Fleisher from 1961), but today, as Kostov points out, it’s the style of many conductors to lead Classical-era pieces — the music of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven — “much lighter and much happier, so it’s not as intense.” (Noseda has demonstrated this approach with the NSO.) Yet Aimard ultimately sees the piece in light of its own history, written at a time when Napoleon’s forces were besieging Vienna.
“It is anything but monumental, anything but beautiful and aesthetic,” he says. “It is a shout for freedom.”
“When it comes to musicians,” Kostov says, “the performance is just 1 percent of what happens underneath.”