Wigmore Hall
Violin Sonata no.9 in A major,
op.47, ‘Kreutzer’
Violin Sonata no.10 in G major,
op.96
How I wish I had been able to
attend the earlier two concerts in this series of three, in which Julia Fischer
and Igor Levit performed all ten of Beethoven’s violin sonatas – or rather,
sonatas for piano and violin, as any self-respecting pianist will tell you. On
the basis of this, the final concert, it would have been a series to remember. Hänsel and Gretel at the Royal
College of Music – it was so good, I saw it twice – intervened however, and
without the mediæval saint’s gift of bilocation, I had to make, as a less than
sainted sometime Prime Minister once put it, ‘tough choices’.
First, then, was the Kreutzer Sonata. Beethoven famously described
it in his sketchbook as having been ‘written in a very concertante style,
almost like that of a concerto’. To which instrument, though, was he referring?
Perhaps to both? He was not, of course, but that is how, in a very positive
sense, it sometimes sounded here, without losing anything of its virtues as
chamber music. Fischer’s violin playing married to near-perfection bracing
physicality – she is one of those players from whom one really can feel the bow
touch, and rather more than merely touch, the strings – with an irreproachable
intellectual grasp and communication of the music. Not that there was any
showmanship to her playing, but this was a performance – which crucially, and
which so many Beethoven performances fail to do – communicated, indeed had us experience
the formal dynamism of the work. So too did Igor Levit, surely one of the
finest pianists of our age even at this stage in his career. (I do not, I
hasten to add, make such claims lightly.) Moreover, the balance between horizontal and vertical
concerns, more, although far from exclusively, a matter for the pianist, never
failed to satisfy, indeed, in true Beethovenian fashion, to bludgeon, if with
charm as well as violence, itself into the consciousness. The first movement
introduction was as full of expectancy as any to a symphony by Haydn or
Beethoven, the Presto proper emerging
from it in the way that, since Beethoven and Romanticism, we have felt
compelled to call ‘organic’. There was fury, yes, but never was the music
harried. Far too many players – often, still more, conductors – seem to equate ‘excitement’
with playing in as fast and unyielding manner as possible; Fischer and Levit
showed far greater maturity, in every sense. Beethoven perhaps made even more
of a revolutionary impact upon variation forms than upon sonata forms. (Perhaps
that is an exaggeration, but consideration of the Diabelli Variations suggest that it might not be.) And yet, in the
slow movement, we heard, if nothing so banal as mere relaxation, then the
sublimity of music that happily, even gratefully, acknowledges its Classical
predecessors as much as, perhaps more than, the Romantic future. There was
urgency, not in the sense of playing everything, or indeed anything too fast,
but founded upon the harmony: Levit’s commanding caress of the bass line has
sometimes to be heard to be believed. But Fischer too understood how much the
ever-changing relationship between violin and piano contributes to harmonic motion.
Melody and its variation should not be, were never, forgotten, but they were
inconceivable without harmony – which is just as it should be. The finale
grabbed one by the scruff of the neck, and again made one listen; every note
could be heard, without that tending to the slightest of pedantry. Rather, it
made one marvel anew at Beethoven’s inspiration.
The performance of the G major
Sonata, op.96, was every bit as fine. It is a remarkable work, perhaps still
more remarkable, although far less popular, than the Kreutzer. I think of it as inhabiting a similar world to the Eighth
Symphony, another work unable to escape, quite unjustly, the shadow of its
predecessor. (Beethoven is said to have accounted for that by the Eighth being ‘so
much better’ than the Seventh.) One must certainly listen intently and without
prejudice, willing to hear what Beethoven writes rather than what one thinks he
might have written. Fischer’s opening trill was not only a thing of beauty in
itself; it was, even before we heard the rest, clearly a harbinger. Not only
did the first group emerge from it, one had a sense, in performance, that
everything else did too. Levit’s voicing of chords was quite magical; I had a
sense that, as Donald Tovey once wrote of Liszt, it would have been impossible
for him not to make a beautiful sound at the piano. So often a progression, a
phrase, would seem to look to the starry skies of the Fourth and Piano
Concertos. And again, one heard, experienced, as well as simply knowing
intellectually, the fundamental (as it were) role of harmony. Levit can make
quite a noise with the piano: there is certainly no authenticism here, from either
pianist or his Steinway Model D. But, as with Fischer, it is never for show.
The slow movement and scherzo both assumed their own character, motivic working
properly generative, and complemented, challenged each other as that truly
extraordinary transition – as concise and as imbued with meaning as anything in
Webern – demands. One might say much the same about the relationship between
the scherzo itself and its trio, the magic of the former’s turn to the major
relished without exaggeration. What I said about variation form in the Kreutzer surely applies still more so to
the finale here. That was certainly what I felt after listening to this
performance. Fischer and Levit proved expert guides to the intertwined paths of
melody and harmony, not just within variations, but still more so between them,
so that unity was as unquestionable as it would have been in a sonata form
movement. Interruptions during the final variation – above all, the fugal
writing, which reminded one of Levit’s prowess in Bach – pointed towards what
we generally consider ‘late’ Beethoven, but the character of movement and
sonata as a whole sounded entirely its own, inseparable from performance.
