Grosses Festspielhaus
Piano Sonata no.30 in E
major, op.109
Piano Sonata no.31 in A-flat
major, op.110Piano Sonata no.32 in C minor, op.111
Maurizio
Pollini’s series of five Royal Festival Hall recitals, spanning music from
Bach to Stockhausen, was not only a highlight of the music year for 2011; it
must rank as a highlight of the century so far. If that sounds like hyperbole,
then I may as well go a little further. Once into his stride, after a slightly
glassy-sounding first movement to op.109, he at least matched, perhaps at times
even surpassed, the identical programme he gave in London – though the latter
had the signal advantage of being performed without an interval, unlike this
Salzburg performance.
If Pollini’s tone in the
first movement of the E major sonata took a little time to warm, there was
intriguing compensation in its inscrutability. It invited, perhaps, but in a
modernistic sense that posed questions and certainly offered no easy answers.
The second movement truly shocked, coming close but never quite attaining
dissolution. This again was Beethoven as Boulez might understand him, indeed
arguably Beethoven going beyond even the latter’s Second Sonata. The finale
offered nothing so banal as mere contrast, but in the dignity, the noble
simplicity of its song, a dialectical negation, whose musical proliferation,
not least in the extraordinary cantilena,
peered at least as far into the world of developing variation and serialism as
Boulez and Stockhausen. The wonders of Beethovenian variation form and sheer
sublimity of those trills were rendered yet more unworldly – and yet utterly human
– by the unerring rightness, both in work and performance, of the syncopation.
One felt almost that the work was being composed anew, which in a sense it was,
the unbroken line of Pollini’s performance testament to the most profound
analytical and dramatic understanding. The conclusion brooked no response.
The opening to op.110
exhibited none of the slight distancing of that to its predecessor. Here
Pollini seemed immediately at ease, almost as if this were an encore. The
sublimity – sorry to repeat myself, but no other word will do – was
indubitable, but there was nothing precious to the performance, the turn to the
minor mode passionate, if perhaps a more mediated passion than one might
encounter in earlier Beethoven. One could only marvel at the extraordinary
concision, all the more so given that the performance never felt in the
slightest rushed. (That, of course, is the key; impetuosity leads to garbling,
not to succinctness.) Greater flexibility than Pollini might once have allowed
himself was to be heard in the second movement. At one point, I even wondered
whether it might prove too much of a good thing, but that was my own
faint-heartedness, since the pianist knew precisely what he was doing and drew
everything together with a perfection that never chilled, permitting the
music’s sheer strangeness fully to register. I am not sure that I have ever
heard the rare world of piano arioso, poised between song and recitative, so
beautifully represented and yet so probingly interrogated as in the opening to
the third movement. Vocal flowering appeared to go beyond what any mere voice
might accomplish – save in the St Matthew
Passion. The fugue may have opened in Bachian fashion, but it was soon very
much of the nineteenth century at least, harmonic necessity assuming the lead. This
was at least as much a trial as serenity, the dialectic between the two
proceeding in a tonal arena that could only make sense – and then only just –
in the age of the sonata.
The opening chords of op.111
were presented, indeed lived, with almost Lisztian vehemence, though it was
immediately clear that this was very different music. Other ghosts of the
musical future made fleeting appearances, the rumbling trills clearly prescient
of Schubert’s own final piano sonata. And yet the titanic struggle, whilst
obviously not something on which Beethoven holds a monopoly, could only truly
have been his, the dialectical relationship between violent gesture and, again,
noble simplicity rendered utterly personal. Again this was perhaps more fluid
than would once have been the case with Pollini: this was very much ‘late’ or,
better, ‘recent’ style. Anyone who doubts that this is music every bit as
difficult as anything in Boulez or Stockhausen would have been silenced by this
performance, Beethoven’s youthful fury aufgehoben
(both negated and preserved). Sublimity and (deceptive) simplicity shone
through the first statement of that ineffably sad theme to the second movement
– despite appalling disruption from some elements in the audience. Already
here, and still more in the first variation, was a revelation of near-Mozartian
smiling through tears, the Classical tension between tonic major and minor
receiving in this sonata a near-definitive exploration. The second variation
suggested triumph of the indomitable human spirit – and I make no apology for
the Romantic descriptions, to which Pollini’s and any genuine modernism stand
anything but opposed. Proliferation was again the key to understanding the
variations’ progress – far more than the unfortunate English-language programme
note. (How could anyone really think of anything so banal as Scott Joplin
here?!) And yet, I must immediately contradict myself, for there can never be a
single key to understanding so complex a work and performance. The complexity –
emotional as much as anything else – of what is allegedly the most
straightforward of all tonalities proved another aid to understanding,
similarly the contest and perhaps reconciliation between human and divine.
One might have expected Pollini
to have left things there; after all, what could possibly follow op.11?. Bach,
perhaps? There was, however, an alternative: encore performances, by turns rapt
and vehement, of two late Bagatelles, op.126, nos 3 and 4. An audience which
had coughed, shuffled, talked, rummaged in handbags, even, during the first
encore, taken a photograph, may not have deserved these performances, but
Beethoven did.
