This cannot be more than an interim report, I had better make clear, based on only short acquaintance with the CD. Having had a rough-and-ready cassette to listen to before that, which offered a balance and quality of sound I could not accept as credible, it's good to report that the CD is characteristic and true to form. It persuades us that this is a faithful picture of the artist and of what he produced in these four Beethoven sonatas under the rather antiseptic conditions DG favour for piano recordings. Very clear, very clean, and just a trifle bloodless. Or am I perhaps blaming the company when I should be criticizing the artist? Seeking, in vain, to find warmth in the playing it was maybe never there. To be fair, of course there are some fine things.
I enjoyed most of Les adieux very much, for Pollini's intellectual grasp of the first movement, in particular, and for the magisterially controlled pianism with which he realizes it. Here, one senses, is Pollini at somewhere near his best, the sovereign technical command at the service of a first-class classical mind, and head, heart and fingers united in a will to convey something. The 'unusual' communications in these sonatas are also well done. It would be impossible to ask for more touching presentation of the sotto voce recitatives in the first movement of the D minor, Op. 31 No. 2, or for more magical colouring of the quiet statements of the rondo of the finale of the Waldstein, pedalled as Beethoven indicated, and successfully, blurred harmony changes and all. Yet these items don't add up to the Pollini Beethoven sonata record I was hoping for. Long stretches of it go by which are perplexing because they seem so empty: the first movement of the Waldstein, the last of Op. 31 No. 2 (very quick and unloving), the first movement of Op. 79 in G, a dance alla tedesca whirled off its feet and left lifeless. How tedious virtuoso readings of familiar music can sometimes be. There is brilliance here which must be admired, but too often the fire doesn't burn from within, and when we go from one event or group of events to another, the progression fails to produce drama. It is a little as if Beethoven had been photographed from the air, and from quite a long way up. The traversal of the terrain is faultless with nothing missed, but when journeys lack mystery and surprise there is correspondingly less excitement, however much sound is produced. Others may react differently but I don't think this record represents Pollini at his best, and to my ears he sounds ill at ease in much of it.'