Beethoven's Piano Sonatas
Beethoven's Piano Sonatas
Gramophone Choice
Complete Piano Sonatas
Wilhelm Kempff (pf)
DG mono 447 966-2GDO8 (8h 31‘ · ADD) Recorded 1951-56. Buy from Amazon
Wilhelm Kempff was the most inspirational of Beethoven pianists. Those who have cherished his earlier stereo cycle for its magical spontaneity will find Kempff’s qualities even more intensely conveyed in this mono set, recorded between 1951 and 1956. Amazingly the sound has more body and warmth than the stereo, with Kempff’s unmatched transparency and clarity of articulation even more vividly caught, both in sparkling allegros and in deeply dedicated slow movements. If in places he’s even more personal, some might say wilful, regularly surprising you with a new revelation, the magnetism is even more intense, as in the great Adagio of the Hammerklavier or the final variations of Op 111, at once more rapt and more impulsive, flowing more freely. The bonus disc, entitled ‘An All-Round Musician’, celebrates Kempff’s achievement in words and music, on the organ in Bach, on the piano in Brahms and Chopin as well as in a Bachian improvisation, all sounding exceptionally transparent and lyrical. Fascinatingly, his pre-war recordings of the Beethoven sonatas on 78s are represented too. Here we have his 1936 recording of the Pathétique, with the central Adagio markedly broader and more heavily pointed than in the mono LP version of 20 years later.
Additional Recommendations
Complete Piano Sonatas
Richard Goode (pf)
Nonesuch 7559 79328-2 (10h 8‘ · DDD) Buy from Amazon
You may have a doubt as to whether all the playing represents everything Goode is capable of: sometimes he disappoints, slightly, by appearing to hold back from the listener the boldness and fullness of communication the greatest players achieve. You might say that, for all their insight and illumination, some of the performances lack the final leap and a degree of transcendence. But his playing is so very likeable: the finish, technical and musical, is immaculate, but on top of that he’s exciting. His sound always makes you listen. His feeling for it and for fine gradations of sound from one end of his wide dynamic range to the other are those of a virtuoso, and inform everything he does. When he’s more obviously on virtuoso territory, he responds to the demands for brilliance and thrilling projection as to the manner born. He’s constantly inside the music, and what a lively, cultivated, lucid and stimulating guide he is. There’s nothing diffident or half-hearted about the way he makes this cycle of Beethoven resound wonderfully, the earlier sonatas appearing no less masterly or characteristic of their composer than the later. His interpretation of the A major Sonata, Op 101, is one of the finest ever put on record.
Complete Piano Sonatas
Paul Lewis (pf)
Harmonia Mundi HMX290 1902/11 (10h55’ · DDD) Buy from Amazon
Paul Lewis’s Beethoven sonata cycle shows him playing down all possible roughness and angularity in favour of a richly humane and predominantly lyrical beauty. Again, here is nothing of that glossy, impersonal sheen beloved of too many young pianists, but a subtly nuanced perception beneath an immaculate surface.
His technique, honed on many ultra-demanding areas of the repertoire, allows him an imaginative and poetic latitude only given to a musical elite. Telescoped phrasing, rapid scrambles for security, waywardness and pedantry he gladly leaves to others, firmly but gently guiding you to the very heart of the composer. His Appassionata is characterised by muted gunfire, as if the sonata’s warlike elements were heard from a distance. Yet the lucidity with which he views such violence easily makes others’ more rampant virtuosity become sound and fury, signifying little. His way, too, with the teasing toccata-like finales of Nos 12 and 22 is typical of his lyrical restraint, a far cry, indeed, from a more overt brilliance. How superbly he captures Beethoven’s over-the-shoulder glance at Haydn, his great predecessor, yet gives you all of his forward-looking Romanticism in the early F minor Sonata (No 1). Again, how many pianists could achieve such unfaltering poise and sensitivity in No 4’s Largo, con gran espressione?
Sometimes his warmth and flexibility suggest Beethoven seen, as it were, through Schubert’s eyes (the finale to Op 31 No 1), and he often suggests a darker, more serious side to the composer’s laughter and high jinks. But he plays Beethoven’s humorous afterthought at the close of the Op 31 No 1’s Allegro vivace as to the manner born and his presto coda to the finale becomes a joyous chase. His way with the Tempest Sonata is a reminder, too, of his outwardly relaxed mastery, quite without a sign of a skewed or telescoped phrase and with page after page given with a quiet but superbly focused intensity. His Adagio is gravely processional, his finale acutely yet subtly and unobtrusively characterised.
Even the composer’s relatively carefree or lightweight gestures are invested with a drama and significance that illuminate them in a novel but wholly natural light. Here is one of those rare pianists who can charge even a single note or momentary pause with drama and significance and convince you, for example, that his lyrical, often darkly introspective way with Beethoven’s pulsing con brio brilliance in the Waldstein Sonata is a viable, indeed, memorable alternative to convention.
So, too, is his way with the Hammerklavier, that most daunting of masterpieces, where he tells us that even when the composer is at his most elemental he remains deeply human and vulnerable. Not for him Schnabel’s headlong attempt to obey Beethoven’s wild first-movement metronome mark; nor does he view the vast spans of the Adagio as ‘like the icy heart of some remote mountain lake’ (JWN Sullivan) but rather a place of ineffable sadness. And here as elsewhere he is able to relish every detail of the composer’s ever-expanding argument while maintaining a flawless sense of line and continuity.
These performances are a transparent act of musical love and devotion. Nothing is exaggerated yet virtually everything is included. Of all the modern versions of the sonatas, Lewis’s is surely the most eloquent and persuasive. Harmonia Mundi’s sound is of demonstration quality.
Complete Piano Sonatas
Friedrich Gulda (pf)
Brilliant Classics 92773 (9h 58’ · ADD) Buy from Amazon
Friedrich Gulda’s stereo Beethoven sonata cycle from the late 1960s differs from his 1950s mono/stereo Decca Beethoven cycle in that the rhythms are tighter, tempi are generally faster, the sonority is more astringent, and the composer’s fingerprint accents are harder-hitting. Tonal warmth, geniality and spacious introspection play little part in Gulda’s expressive game plan, and that may not sit well with collectors who gravitate towards Kempff’s intimately scaled, multi-hued conceptions (see above). Perhaps the Op 10 triumvirate best typifies Gulda’s chosen Beethoven style: the C minor Sonata’s finale truly takes the composer’s controversial Prestissimo at face value. The three Op 31 works and the Op 26 ‘Funeral March’ Sonata receive unusual and refreshingly stark, headlong readings. Yet Gulda is anything but predictable. If the Appassionata’s unyielding drive and gaunt patina are positively Brechtian, he pulls the Waldstein apart to a fault.
Among the late sonatas, tension and severity serve Gulda’s Opp 109 and 110 less well than in his remarkably concentrated Hammerklavier. And who’d have expected such an affectionately nuanced Op 54, Op 28 or Pathétique slow movement? All told, the pianist’s occasional idiosyncrasies and misfired moments are but a tiny price to pay for a stimulating, absorbing Beethoven cycle whose virtues proudly stand the test of time. The recording is closely miked, slightly dry yet decidedly impactful.
Complete Piano Sonatas. Diabelli Variations, Op 120.Eroica Variations, Op 35. Six Bagatelles, Op 126
Friedrich Gulda (pf)
Orfeo mono C808 109L (10h 45’ · ADD) Recorded 1953, 1954 & 1957 Buy from Amazon
Orfeo’s nine-CD set of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas (plus the Eroica and Diabelli Variations, and the Bagatelles, Op 126, all from 1957) is no mere duplication of what we already have. Indeed, this 1953-54 Austrian Radio sonata cycle falls almost exactly midway between the constituent parts of the Gulda cycle that Decca issued on LP (and subsequently reissued as an 11-CD set in its Original Masters series).
Oddly enough the first point of contrast to hit home, specifically in the early sonatas, is the enormous superiority of Orfeo’s recordings, which are clearer, better focused and generally far more listenable than their Decca counterparts. As to the performances, take the slow movement of Op 7 which has greater breadth than on the 1957 Decca (stereo) recording (Gulda’s Amadeo version – now on Brilliant Classics, see above – was swifter even than the Decca), and where the poise and pacing are pretty close to perfect. The first movement of the Decca Moonlight, infamous in its day, swims in a sea of sustain pedal, an effect that Gulda hadn’t yet hit upon in the early 1950s, much to one’s relief. The Tempest, Waldstein and Appassionata sonatas are startlingly red-blooded (the Waldstein’s first movement in particular is charged with an unusually high level of nervous energy) and the later sonatas capture that almost inexpressible combination of physical confrontation and spiritual engagement that only the greatest Beethovenians can muster. Gulda was always at his best in the last three sonatas but his Decca Hammerklavier, for all its trimness and brilliance, rarely matches this one for impact.
Gulda could charm, too, and you’d have to go a long way to find a more lyrical reading of the G major Sonata, Op 14 No 2. It is hardly credible that all this interpretative accomplishment was achieved by a pianist who, at the time, was still only in his early twenties, and who would subsequently divide his musical activities between the Viennese classics and varieties of jazz.
There are certain records that seem to capture the very moment when a fledgling virtuoso first confronts a great corpus of musical work, and this marvellous set represents such a confrontation.
