Pierre Boulez Saal
Piano Sonata no.7 in D major,
op.10 no.3
Piano Sonata no.8 in C minor,
op.13, ‘Pathétique’Piano Sonata no.19 in G minor, op.49 no.1
Piano Sonata no.20 in G major, op.49 no.2
Piano Sonata no.26 in E-flat major, op.81a, ‘Les Adieux’
Saleem Ashkar (piano)
Saleem Ashkar has, over the
course of the 2016-17 concert season, been performing all of Beethoven’s piano
sonatas, each concert at a different venue in Berlin. This, the seventh in the
series, took place in the new Pierre Boulez Saal. Ashkar has, according to the
programme, been attempting to connect ‘Beethoven’s music, through film clips
and conversations, with some of the issues that still concern our global
society: the relationship of art, freedom, and power; the meaning of religion;
nationality and identity.’ This concert was to be followed by a panel
discussion, for which I was unable to stay.
It was preceded by a short film
– five minutes or so – concerning the activities of the Berlin-based Al-Farabi
Musikakademie, a programme of the Deutsche Kinder- und Jugendstiftung
(German Children and Youth Federation), on which Ashkar, seen in the film, puts
his time and fingers where his mouth is. Children from twelve years old to
twenty, some of them refugees, some not, make music on all manner of
instruments: the Western tradition at the heart of their activities, which are
yet equally receptive to what they might bring to the organisation too. One nineteen-year-old
Pakistani boy spoke, in far more fluent German than I should muster, about how
he would have had no such opportunity in Pakistan. There could be little doubt
from what we saw and heard that the composer who presented his Missa solemnis, ‘Von Herzen – Möge es
wieder – Zu Herzen gehen!’ would have lent his support, as has Daniel Barenboim
as patron.
Ashkar was here as pianist,
though. If I had a few reservations, nothing too great, they concerned the
first of the sonatas he played, op.10 no.3 in D major. It is a difficult work
to bring off – for the listener as well as the player, so it may have been my
fault. I was struck, in any case, by the bright sound of Ashkar’s Bechstein in
this splendid acoustic. It may have been equally tempered, but there remained a
sense of open strings. Ashkar certainly too the first movement as marked too: Presto, not merely Allegro. The different ‘character’ of the second group was
pronounced too, whilst still arising from what had gone before. That and the
new lease of life lent by the development – crossing of hands was felt
musically as well as seen – testified to a properly dynamic conception of
sonata form, likewise the recapitulation as second development. Perhaps the
ending felt a little perfunctory, but I do not wish to exaggerate. A flowing
account of the slow movement enabled Ashkar to project the longer line. Its
almost Boulezian melodic proliferation as the music progressed had one feel
that this was definitely piano music, and not only music that happened to be
written for the piano. Sadness marked the close, reminding one that the
movement as a whole is marked Largo e
mesto. The minuet returned to the good nature of the first movement,
sounding ‘earlier’ than its predecessor. Its trio proved winningly tiggerish.
It was the finale I found more difficult to get along with; it seemed a bit
unsmiling and I struggled sometimes to grasp the thread. As I said, though,
perhaps that was my fault; in any case, Beethovenian disjunctures will always
have something to tell us.
The Pathétique Sonata came next. Its first movement Introduction was
weighty without being laden down with applied ‘emotion’. Crucially, the
exposition proper shot forth like a rocket: not merely fast (although I think
it probably was faster than I have often heard, or indeed played!) but dynamic.
Whilst there had been much to admire in the performance of op.10 no.2, this
immediately sounded to my ears more ‘finished’ as an interpretation. And so it
continued, absorbingly. Again, I wondered whether the close to the movement
were a little abrupt, whether a little more rhetoric might have been in order,
but better that than self-regarding ‘drama’. The other two movements were
similar, on their own terms, of course, the slow movement songful, as if in a
single breath (easier said than done!), the finale, quite rightly, sounding
with more than a hint of post-Mozartian spirit too.
The two little op.49 sonatas
followed the interval. The first movement of the G minor Sonata offered a
disarming noble, Mozartian simplicity, thereby bringing into relief those turns
that could only have been imagined by Beethoven. I loved the intensification in
the recapitulation: not exaggerated, speaking ‘for itself’. The second movement
brought delightful release, with hints of echt-Beethovenian
brusqueness. In the first movement of the G major Sonata, the spirit of Mozart
was again strong, although again not to the exclusion, perhaps especially
during the development, of other tendencies. The second movement was decidedly post-Mozartian: looking back to a world
that might be close and yet which had gone forever. Ashkar’s tempo ensured
that: slower than if it had been Mozart himself, just as Beethoven feels the
need to advise, ‘Tempo di Menuetto’. The owl of Minerva, one felt, had already spread
its wings.
Les
Adieux proved properly
generative, the contrasts and even discontinuities of the first movement part and
parcel of a complexity that yet permitted of a certain degree of overcoming (Aufhebung, if we are to stick with
Hegel), of integration. The performance drew us in to listen, to experience the
work, great clarity a definite assistance here, as elsewhere. Dynamism here has
to be created before one’s ears – and it was. The rareness of the air in the
second movement was immediately felt – not through false piety but (seemingly)
simply by breathing it. At times, the music looked forward towards Schumann,
without reaching him – for how could it? The obstinacy, though, was Beethoven’s
own, as was the pathos. The finale then burst forth out of necessity. Joy could
perhaps not be quite so unconfined as in early Beethoven, nor so unmediated.
For whether we like it or no, Beethoven’s later music, like our fractured
modernity more generally, is and becomes ever more complicated. To endure that
modernity, we need his music all the more, as the children of the Al-Farabi
Musikakademie will surely soon inform us.
