I'm listening to the Kempff/Leitner/Berlin Philharmonic/DGG recordings of the Beethoven Piano Concertos, and now to number three in C minor, one of my all time favourite pieces. First movement. Slow movement.

And it is out of tune.

It is amazing how many recordings, especially for some reason piano concerto recordings, are thus disfigured. This one, I think, has the piano badly tuned so that the upper registers are flat compared to the rest, and the woodwind is sharper than the strings. I can't be sure precisely what is wrong, or all that is wrong, but something very definitely is, let me tell you.

Not everywhere in the performance, it seems. We've now reached the last movement, and the orchestra sounds okay, and now so does the piano. But the first two movements were horrible.

I don't have perfect pitch. I can't, that is to say, sing exact notes out of nowhere or tell you if someone else's notes are sharp or flat if I have nothing to compare them with. But if two notes are supposed to be the same and are actually very slightly different, I can tell, and so, I should guess, can most music lovers. So what were DGG thinking when they arranged for "Prof. Elsa Schiller" to do the Production of these recordings? It was basically her fault, yes? I've never heard that name in any other connection whatsoever, and I'm not surprised.

Is it intrinsically hard to achieve proper tuning when you are making a recording? Are are some recording venues treacherous from the tuning point of view? Do performances that sound fine to the naked ear on the day emerge from the machines all mis-tuned and hideous? Is that what's happening? If so, it is not surprising if some major recordings go haywire in this respect.

What is not pardonable, however, is that reviewers so seldom pick up on these things. I've never read of this particular performance being disfigured tuning-wise. But trust me, it is. And I seem to recall very similar and if anything even worse tuning problems afflicting some of the Barenboim/Klemperer/EMI recordings of the same pieces, and I've never read anyone complaining about that either. Extraordinary. Occasionally magazines like Gramophone get grumpy letters to the editor complaining in the manner of this posting, but the reviewers seldom rock the boat by dissing the products of the major labels for being thus deranged. Only obscure and powerless labels get slated, or individual string players for not playing properly in tune (for which the producer can't be blamed except insofar as he should perhaps have made them do it again).

Maybe I have better ears than I thought. Perhaps some people don't like classical music for the simplest of all reasons. They don't hear it.

I'm listening now to number four, which sounds much better. The problem was only with the first two movements of three.