Weber's four sonatas were overdue for a new CD recording, and they have found a fine and sensitive interpreter in Garrick Ohlsson. He is a pianist who can touch extremes, which suits Weber's dramatic temperament; he is also thoughtful, with an elegant sense of form. The latter quality is important, since Weber, never really at home in sonata form, likes to make his own structures, and asks of his performers that they shall understand the point of them—which is sometimes overtly or covertly dramatic—and not try to force them into conventional forms. He also, perhaps paradoxically for one of the great pianists of the age, reminds listeners from time to time that he was the father figure of romantic orchestration. A true Weber pianist needs to keep his antennae a-quiver.
Ohlsson is first rate. In the First Sonata, he has the sense of fantasy which the opening movement demands (though why does he clip the even semiquaver phrasing so drily?). He opens not with a great crash of tone on the diminished sevenths that so uncannily anticipate Chopin's Revolutionary Study, but almost coolly: it works in the context of his quite light but well-conceived reading of the movement (I wish he had taken the repeat). In the Adagio he opens with beautifully lucent tone, turning to the second subject (which is in much the manner of some of Weber's guitar songs) with nice rubato and sensuous warmth of tone. He takes the Minuet slower than its Allegro marking would warrant, but justifies this by bringing out a latently sinister feeling: I doubt if Weber would have complained. The finale is taken at breakneck speed, with a beautifully even, pearly sound. Ohlsson uses a modern Bosendorfer, and who is to object?
This intelligent variety of manner and of approach distinguishes the other three sonatas. The Second Sonata opens not with the grandiose sweep of many performances—and it can take that approach, too—but with a reflective quality that is actually implied by much else in the movement, including some of the markings (passionato, leggiermente, con molt' affetto and so on). It is a reading that prepares well for the contrasts of the Andante, a solemn, considered reading here, and the Minuet, which goes at scherzo pace. The finale returns to a more plaintive, gentle manner. The tempo is only moderato, and this balances beautifully the opening movement, and the two central movements between them.
The Third Sonata opens, as Weber asks, Allegro feroce: this is a tense, urgent piece of playing (and again, it is good to have the repeat). The Andante con moto requires of the pianist a real range of keyboard sonorities, implying as it does such a variety of instrumental, even orchestral textures: Ohlsson handles this with great sensitivity and intelligence. The recording engineers, quick to catch what he is doing, only let him down in the Chopinesque trio in the scherzo of the last of the four sonatas. This work Ohlsson plays, with, I think, something less than the desperate, death-haunted urgency which the music surely implies. He is sensitive with it, and responds to the work's almost monothematic nature (the obsessive descending scale), but I have heard performances which bring out more affectingly the music's possessed quality.
However, these are distinguished performances, by a pianist of true romantic temper, of four works that have had more than their share of misunderstanding from performers and critics alike. Ohlsson also gives nimble accounts of two little jeux d'esprits, and of the famous Invitation to the dance. For all the charm and elegance of Berlioz's indispensable orchestration (a pity that Glinka's is lost), I continue to prefer the original. It has a point, in its solo virtuosity, and is a fascinating harbinger of much that was to be explored by Schumann and Liszt, among many other of the great romantics. Ohlsson plays it most winningly.'