Keys to Beethoven
GUREWITSCH, M. ANATOLE
On Music KEYS TO BEETHOVEN M. ANATOLE GUREWITSCH LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN No single exponent of Beethoven's keyboard literature dominates our age. That is as it should be. For to canonize one...
...Artists so dedicated to the sheer smoothness of the acoustic signal deserve better...
...The second movement (Largo) shows another side of von Karajan's and Weissenberg's art...
...Weissenberg's singing line and resonant arpeggios, and the orchestra's forbidding grandeur that declines to an awestruck hush, spread the Andante con moto before us in all its mystery...
...On trills in the higher registers, to give a particularly striking example, the instrument hisses, and we hear far too much of wood against wood or wood against felt or felt against wire...
...Against all fashionable currents, Beethoven in his last period went questing deeper and deeper into the abstractions of baroque counterpoint, even integrating the fuguethat most mathematical of musical configurations—into the fabric of sonata form...
...It is Concerto No...
...Since (along with Haydn and Mozart) he is one of the supreme forgers of the classical style, the choice is sound...
...But in the main, the visceral impact is negligible...
...Von Karajan, most of whose major recordings are on DG, usually gets it, too...
...The two pianists cannot be compared directly, because their repertoires are not the same...
...73, whose exaltation cannot be captured by their streamlined manner...
...Still, even such impersonal transmissions of scores presuppose interpretive decision, judgment and choice...
...The Beethoven piano concertos, some of them coupled with sonatas, appear on individual discs, the latest featuring the B flat in a rendition that makes an immeasurably greater appeal to the heart than Weissenberg's...
...Seraphim, the budget label of Angel Records, has recently been reissuing recordings of the pianist known as Solomon, active from the '20s to the mid-'50s and one of the finest keyboard lyricists...
...it would be impossible to take on the late sonatas without it...
...3 in C minor, op...
...In Weissenberg's pianism, passion is secondary to the lucid explication of the musical text...
...The best single performance in the set is that of Sonata No...
...But Pollini's tempos are brisk...
...The beautifully sculpted opening movement boasts high festivity and silken passagework...
...Pollini plays The Late Sonatasopus numbers 101, 106 (the "Hammerklavier"), 109, 110, and 111...
...The Angel album with Weissenberg and von Karajan can't compare...
...He seems to inject no opinion: He simply sets forth the notes in their relationships and the silences between them...
...In the second, the piano's mournfulness overcomes the severity of the orchestra in a haunting confrontation that has been described as an evocation of Orpheus charming the savage beasts...
...The opening piano solo, for all its meditative eloquence, is carefully reined in...
...109, for instance, is played gently, with delicately modulated urgency...
...they control it...
...29 in B flat major, op...
...His performance clocks in at 43 minutes, whereas Soviet pianist Grigory Sokolov's executionrecently released on ABC Records (AY-6703) takes up 52...
...the Prestissimo movement positively roils...
...101 and 111 are paired on DG 2530 870...
...The Weissenberg set offers The Five Piano Concertos, performed with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Herbert von Karajan (Angel SD-38-54...
...At every dynamic level, from the threshold of silence to the immensity beyond thunder, the tone remains round and handsome—never distorted, never painful...
...4 in G major, op...
...Other artists place us inside the action of this movement...
...Von Karajan, like Weissenberg, looks for and achieves the utmost in textual transparency, and together they weave an amazing seduction through sheer technical mastery...
...Weissenberg's abstract, expert musicianship also accords perfectly with von Karajan's, and the Concerto No...
...But Pollini is always highly personal, leading to choices not everyone will agree with...
...The piano begins with a preliminary flourish of parallel ascending scales, then takes up the opening phrase of the exposition, which closes with a brisk rising fourth to the tonic, played twice...
...Deutsche Gram-mophon's sound on the Pollini isas practically always—close to ideal: clear, spacious, rich, and bright, even when the pianist is at his most ferocious...
...the great chords toward the end of the movement glow without blinding...
...to my ears, the melody is therefore somewhat obstructed...
...It receives a bright, attractive performance...
...30 in E major, op...
...here, we seem to watch from above as its pageant evolves, seeing all with godlike clarity...
...31 in A flat major, op...
...101 with truly radioscopic perspicuity...
...110, he makes rather heavy weather of the repeated chords accompanying the Arioso dolente...
...In the second movement of Sonata No...
...Technically the most difficult of Beethoven's piano works, it is also the longest by a considerable margin...
...The Adagio combines smoothly sustained phrasing with a very proper weight and stateliness, and the fugue of the fourth movement unfolds with majesty...
...106, the so-called "Ham-merklavier...
...The first movement of the Sonata No...
...Of the Concerto No...
...They do better in the Concerto No...
...the hallmark of these recordings is control, that of the Pollini set is intuition...
...Its Gypsy-like theme implies a moodiness that is not supplied, and it is impossible to establish any link between the spirit of the music and the emotional reserve of the executants...
...37, illustrates the strengths and the limits of their vision...
...The great crescendos in the Scherzo are immensely eventful: with the rising volume, the colors change...
...Weissenberg's burnished, melancholy statement of the first theme sets the tone for the entire masterly traversal of the opening movement...
...28 in A major, op...
...For to canonize one performer's interpretation is to diminish our own experience of a composer's work...
...Weissenberg and von Karajan do not abandon themselves to the music...
...1 in C major, op...
...Thus Weissenberg presents Beethoven first of all as a musical architect...
...5 in E flat major, op...
...15, the pianist and the conductor give a measured, precisely articulated account...
...and while some of the first movement may take too Prussian an accent, the rondo has (in view of the performers) an unexpected ebullience...
...A final word on sound: Of all instruments, the piano is probably the hardest to record well...
...the Rondo begins with rippling serenity and then explodes...
...At the same time, this segment reveals his intuitiveness, the amazing variety of textures he can summon forth...
...Yet parts of the concertos resist such control, including the Rondo in this Third Concerto...
...it results in imposing renditions—and if passion is not the pianist's first concern, it nevertheless wells up again and again in the very shape of the sonic design...
...Once allowances are made for stylistic differences inherent in the material, however, it becomes clear that complementary aspects of the composer are illuminated by each man's reading...
...The orchestra's sweeping phrases rise only to mezzoforte, then drop in exquisitely calibrated subito piani...
...the "Hammerklavier" is also available separately as DG 2530 869, while op...
...Weissenberg's authority in the scales, especially on the imperious fourths, announces the heightened rhetorical excitement of the commencing dialogue between the concerto's two coequal protagonists—the soloist and the orchestra...
...The intellectual experience, on the other hand, is intense—indeed thrilling...
...Proof of this is provided in important new recordings by Alexis Weiss-enberg and Maurizio Pollini, who take substantially divergent approaches to Beethoven, yet at their best both touch the heart of his creations...
...58, though, that offers the most profound experience on this set...
...the earliest of these dates to 1816, and all fall well into Beethoven's late period...
...The Italian pianist conjures the music's meaning, first of all, in the intricacies of shifting affective values...
...19 (actually, the earliest of the five, but the second to be publishedhence the misnumber-ing...
...the concertos belong to the composer's early and middle periods, the last of the series (the "Emperor") having been written in 1809...
...Pollini presents the fugue in the Finale of Sonata No...
...Not that he lacks a firm grasp of structure...
...He is submissive and attentive to the vast range of sensibilities in the late sonatas, realizing them with particular justness...
...The three-record album is on Deutsche Grammophon 2709 072...
...Further on, in the "Perdendo le for-ze" ("Losing strength"), his playing does not seem ashen enough to make the intended contrast...
...Nonetheless, such passagesand they will hardly be the same ones for all listeners—never disengage us from the developing musical thought...
...2 in B flat major, op...
...In the first movement (Allegro con brio), the orchestra's taut statement of the exposition is answered by the soloist's magisterial entrance...
...True, in the cadenza (Weissenberg plays Beethoven's own throughout), the pianist surprises with a shimmer and sparkle that almost suggest Ravel, and he gives the bass line a warp and glide that adds a bloom of sensuality...
...The same generally holds for the Concerto No...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 1
