Pierre Boulez Saal
Violin Sonata no.8 in G major,
op.30 no.3
Violin Sonata no.9 in A minor/major,
op.47, ‘Kreutzer’
Violin Sonata no.10 in G major,
op.96
Pinchas Zukerman (violin)
Daniel Barenboim (piano)
All good things must come to an
end. So it was with Daniel Barenboim and Pinchas Zukerman’s anniversary-year survey
of the Beethoven violin sonatas, in which the final three sonatas offered a
richer selection of stylistic and emotional contrast than any yet heard. A fine
tribute, then, to Isaac Stern on his centenary.
The first movement of the op.30
no.3 Sonata was taken faster than I can recall. It never sounded merely fast,
though, but impetuous, even tiggerish. Occasional initial smudges, vanished in
any case on the exposition repeat, mattered not at all; the spirit was there
and was what counted. This was, moreover, a true partnership, bringing out such
musical meaning in what might appear on the page, at least to dull souls, mere scales
and arpeggios. The development, over before we knew it, had nevertheless
changed everything, change which continued throughout the recapitulation. Such
freshness was followed by quiet, transformative confidence in the second
movement, assuredly ‘molto moderato e grazioso’. It sang with neither need nor
desire to exaggerate, Beethoven and his performers able both to emulate Mozart
without anxiety of influence, yet also to remain entirely true to themselves.
The finale, whilst recognisably in the first movement’s line, proved both
grander and more skittish, following the dictates of the material yet
transforming them into musical narration.
The eloquence of opening
statements, violin and piano, minor and major, offered an exposition to an
exposition for the first movement of the Kreutzer.
The exposition proper hurtled forward, not always note-perfect in the piano part
– but then, neither is Bartók, in his extraordinary recording with Szigeti –
yet again with the crucial spirit far too often lacking in contemporary
Beethoven. Humanism defiant and unapologetic is what we need, just as much as
Beethoven; humanism defiant and unapologetic is what we had, in a performance
that had one on the edge of one’s seat, in a good way. It developed, with all
that that properly entailed. And it had a scale, a stature, quite different from
anything we had heard previously. The slow movement, leisurely yet directed,
felt just right: it had space, yet not too much. Within its overall frame,
further transformations could unfold: of tempo, melody, rhythm, and ultimately
of harmony too. Each variation had its own world, clearly related to and
dependent on the whole, yet pointed with individual character. With the minore variation, pathos was felt as
necessity, Beethoven’s Mozartian – and Bachian – lessons well learned indeed.
The fourth variation immediately following conveyed a sense of wonder, of having
passed beyond to a pastoral idyll. Everything was there, so long as one
listened in the fullest sense of the word. The finale offered a fine sense of
tonal ambiguity. Which mode would win out? This was a battle to be won, no fait accompli. Rhetoric was founded on
harmony, not some strange sort of free-floating thing-in-itself, as some would
have you believe. With Beethoven, only connect.
The tenth and final sonata,
op.96 in G major, is not heard often enough. I am not sure that it could ever be
heard enough, not in this fallen world anyway. From the outset, its greater
subtlety and complexity registered: never forbidding, but inviting. Barenboim
and Zukerman led us by the hand through a first movement whose developmental
mastery is so perfect it almost ceases in itself to register. On the cusp of
what we know as late Beethoven, it suggests – and certainly did so here – other
possibilities, other pathways: related, yet not necessarily quite the same as
those eventually travelled. There was no need to display anything on the sleeve,
whether here or in the Adagio espressivo.
Yet the more one was drawn in, the closer one listened, the more radical the scope
and peculiarities of the harmonic field Beethoven and his performers mapped
out. Concentration and contrasts in the scherzo came close to suggesting
presentiments of Webern. The final movement, then, acted not only as a finale
to this sonata but to the series as a whole. It united so many earlier
tendencies, introducing a few more for good measure, in a dialectical fashion
it was ultimately futile not to think of as ‘late’. Further complications proved
as pleasurable as they were necessary. Heroism and mastery take many forms,
both in work and performance.