Mozart and Beethoven: a journey from and return to the white keys of the piano

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Piano Sonata No. 16 in C, KV 545
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Fantasie, KV 475, and Piano Sonata in C minor, KV 457
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Sonata for Piano No. 27 in E minor, op.90
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Sonata for Piano No. 32 in C minor, op.111

‘Too easy for children, too difficult for artists’

‘A little keyboard sonata for beginners’. With those words Mozart entered the C major Piano Sonata, K 545 in his thematic catalogue on 26 June 1788. They encapsulate the problem posed to posterity not just by this work, but by all of Mozart’s essays in the genre. So too does the description, ‘Sonata facile’, under which it was first published in 1805. ‘Too easy for children, too difficult for artists,’ was Artur Schnabel’s celebrated description of Mozart’s piano sonatas. In that respect, this decidedly ‘late’, spare work – let us not confuse apparently modest technical demands with dilution of artistry – offers their ne plus ultra. The once common relegation of Mozart’s piano sonatas to the uncomprehendingly condescending realm of ‘teaching pieces’ receives confirmation and yet its greatest refutation; this teaching piece is so much more than that.

 

There is rarely anywhere for the performer to hide in Mozart; here, that tendency is taken to its Webern-like extreme. Only the greatest of pianists and musicians will emerge unscathed –and perhaps only on a lucky day. Extreme simplicity of texture does not, however, inhibit musical expression or exploration; it encourages them. Not only for Stravinsky (‘The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit’) could limitation serve as a spur to invention. What might seem mere ‘instructive’ features – concentration upon the white keys of the piano at times to rival neo-Classical Stravinsky; ability to ‘sing’ a long, legato line; facility (far from facile) with scales, arpeggios, sequences, ‘Scotch snap’ ornaments, and a good few ‘basic’ finger patterns – are explored, yet no more ‘in themselves’, without ‘musical’ expression and priority, than in, say, a Chopin Etude.

 

The first movement’s structure seems to proceed according to textbook ‘sonata form’, until a gentle jolt is received in the recapitulation: the first subject not in the tonic, but in the subdominant, F major. The recapitulation itself seems more to open up new paths than really to recapitulate, and the second subject necessarily sounds different, not only in the tonic, but in a different key from its big brother. In light of that subdominant surprise, Mozart eschews his most typical practice for the slow movement, by moving instead to the dominant, G major for the (apparently) effortlessly lyrical Andante. Here, as indeed in its predecessor and successor, texture and expectations are such that the introduction of any chromatic note registers with a harmonic effect both subtle and yet unmistakeable. The turn to G minor offers a hint of something sterner, noble, if not quite tragic. Repeated thirds announced at the opening of the finale offer another instance of the union of ‘technical’ and ‘musical’ requirements. The player will learn, practise, attempt to perfect. (S)he will also hear pairs of woodwind, relate the work to Mozart’s concertante, symphonic, operatic, and other writing, and consider how that device and that harmony proves generative for the movement as a whole. (So too, God willing, will the listener.) This rondo alternates between statements of this principle theme and a typically Mozartian profusion of balancing alternatives, returning us home to C major at just the right moment: an instruction in form, just as much as more narrowly defined technique.

 

Sturm und Drang: Mozart in the minor mode

The C minor Fantasia and Sonata, K 475/457, the former apparently written in 1785 as a post hoc ‘prelude’ to the sonata composed in the previous year, stand in many ways at the other extreme of Mozart’s solo piano output. With the possible exception of the D major Sonata, K 576, they are the least likely to be considered ‘too easy’, whether in technical or musical terms. Nevertheless, relative to much of Mozart’s concertante writing for the instrument, or indeed to the overt virtuosity required by Beethoven and other successors, Schnabel’s caution would still hold. We hear instantiated the paradox, or better dialectic, fundamental to the entirety of the Austro-German musical tradition from Bach (and earlier) to Schoenberg (and beyond): freedom and organisation are two sides of the same musical coin. Likewise all manner of other musical dialectics: major and minor; diatonic and chromatic; fury and repose; ‘instrumental’ and ‘vocal’; and so on. The Classical style, as Charles Rosen would have put it, is perhaps especially adept at bringing such contests – and reconciliations – to the musical fore.

 

In the Fantasia, a homage to the extemporising, Sturm und Drang tradition of C.P.E. Bach’s keyboard works, which yet entails a mastery in navigating the tonal universe worthy of Emanuel Bach’s father, Mozart’s minor-mode daemon delves into the deepest chromatic, ‘expressive’ reaches, vertically and horizontally. Listen to the almost dizzying round of modulations with which the opening ‘Adagio’ section, the first of six, takes flight, just as harmonically disorienting, and yet also just as sure of its destination, as the celebrated opening to the development of the first movement of the G minor Symphony, K 550. It also offers the pianist, ‘child’ or ‘artist’, similar technical challenges, a few levels advanced, to those in the ‘easier’ C major Sonata. (The ‘Alberti bass’ figuration in the left hand is never far away.) As the great Mozart scholar-pianist Denis Matthews explained, the Fantasia ‘achieves unity and continuity because each [section] (except the last) is open-ended and unresolved, as though aware of an imminent change of scene.’ In Mozart’s instrumental music, the opera house is never distant.

 

C minor emphatically reinstated at the close, it provides the springboard for the explorations of the Sonata’s ‘Molto allegro’ first movement (an unusual marking for Mozart, another point in common with the aforementioned Symphony). Sinuous chromaticism, once again presaging Wagner and Schoenberg in its vertical and horizontal formulations, offers a counterweight to solidity of tonal purpose. Such is the world of opera seria, never more so than in the tragic yet consoling pathos of the ‘Neapolitan’ move to D-flat major in the recapitulation. The second movement rondo offers the ‘scoring’ and mood of an operatic aria, replete with embellishments in the returns of the theme and the coda, some of them unknown until as recently as 1990, when Mozart’s autograph (now in the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in Salzburg) was rediscovered in Philadelphia. Elements of its form and that of the first movement are combined, contested, sublimated in the Allegro assai finale. Will-o’-the-wisp mystery announced by multiple syncopations in the opening theme, it finds its dialectical opposing force in vehement, tragic eruptions, as if from Idomeneo’s Elettra or some other great seria heroine. The coda’s closing underline the return to C minor, tonic and dominant, almost as if it were Beethoven insisting; however, the foregoing chromaticism and sudden balm of A-flat major brook no Mozartian argument.

 

Soft-spoken Romanticism

Beethoven’s E minor Sonata, op.90, belongs to that extraordinary group of works – give or take the execrable Wellington’s Victory – that stand almost, yet not quite, on the threshold of his ‘late’ period: the world of the Bagatelles as much as the sonatas. A performance will last roughly as long as one of Mozart’s ‘Sonata facile’, and some of the motivic building blocks are still far from dissimilar either from that or from the C minor Fantasia and Sonata. Something of the Fantasia’s open-ended freedom may be discerned in the opening, E minor movement: not only is there no exposition repeat, but, as another fine pianist-scholar William Kinderman has noted, many of the formal divisions between exposition and development, and development and recapitulation, are elided. Triple-time, minor-mode restlessness might seem to suggest commonality with the Mozart Sonata, but the energy of ascending E minor arpeggios is quite different: lonelier, more ‘Romantic’, less defiant, than Mozart’s thunderbolts of Zeus.

 

The second movement, taking a path very different from Mozart the tragedian, turns to E major. Its kinship to Schubert has often been noted; Kinderman calls it ‘the most Schubertian movement in Beethoven.’ Indeed, there is something of the Romantic wayfarer to it, perhaps something even of Beethoven the Lieder composer, above all the composer of the first song-cycle, An die ferne Geliebte. It marks the final staging post in Beethoven’s series of gently lyrical, long-breathed rondo finales. Variation comes through the changing character of the episodes and the light they shed upon the returning, more or less unvaried theme.

 

A final reckoning: Beethoven’s last piano sonata

 

With the final sonata on the programme, we return to C minor for the work which, not least on account of its final placing in the series of thirty-two, retains perhaps the greatest aura of all amongst Beethoven’s piano sonatas. Beethoven revered, arguably inherited Mozart’s C minor daemon, remarking, following a performance of Mozart’s C minor Piano Concerto, K 491: ‘We shall never have any idea such as this.’ The third and, of course, last of Beethoven’s piano sonatas in this key, it is, like the op.90 Sonata, written in two, greatly contrasted movements: respectively in tonic minor and tonic major. Any parallels one might draw with earlier works, though, will be confounded by other aspects of this unquestionably ‘late’ world. Counterpoint and harmony remain as two sides of the same late Classical coin: rarer, alas, in performance than one might suspect. The diminished seventh chord, as in Mozart, as in Beethoven’s own Pathétique Sonata and Fifth Symphony, offers both vertical and horizontal impetus from the very first melodic interval onwards. Fugal methods, as so often in late Beethoven, feature strongly, melding with sonata form to offer a still more titanic conception of struggle. The exposition’s move to the submediant, to A-flat major, rather than to the conventional relative major, E-flat, perhaps helps set up the possibility of the surprise, hushed tierce di Picardie conclusion in C major, presaging the finale’s tonality (and returning to that of the first work heard tonight).

It is a set of variations on a hymn-like ‘Arietta’, caught in the balance and/or dialectic between sublime simplicity and necessary complexity. Rhythm – harmonic rhythm as much as ‘mere’ metre – is key to Beethoven’s progress through the celebrated ‘boogie-woogie’ variation – in truth, its anticipation of jazz tells us very little – and beyond. Asked by Anton Schindler as to why he had not written a third movement, Beethoven, should we trust his interlocutor’s account, gave the appropriately contemptuous response that he had had no time to do so. For there can be no doubting the transcending finality of these variations: nor the profound quality of resolution Beethoven here offers to the violent conflicts enunciated in the preceding Allegro. White-key C major, possessed once more of but a very few inflections, spins its trillingly gossamer way towards a quietly intoned and quietly unanswerable Amen.

(This essay was first published as a programme note for a 2017 Salzburg Festival recital given by Grigory Sokolov.)

Two piano recitals noted, not reviewed: Katz and Sokolov

These concerts will have to remain simply as diary items, I am afraid. (I flatter myself that someone else might care!) Having been very busy during the past week or so of March, as well as – well, you know that little thing Theresa May did and how it might have affected me, I simply ran out of time to review these two piano recitals. I hasten to add that that should not in any sense be taken as a comment on the performances. Had I had time, I should have greeted more fully excellent pianism from Amir Katz and indeed the wonderful opportunity to hear all twelve of the Transcendental Etudes in concert. (I do not think I have had it before.) I mean no disrespect to a pianist I certainly hope to hear again by saying that the memory of Grigory Sokolov’s performances of KV 545, 475/457 and Beethoven’s final piano sonata (as well as no fewer than seven encores, one of them as substantial as Schumann’s C major Arabeske) will, I hope, remain with me forever. What Sokolov can do with the instrument… But I should stop there, before this turns into an ersatz review.

In the meantime, I have also been taking in more spoken drama (very good, I hope, for my German): which I almost always keep as a treat to myself: something on which I shall not have to write. Normal service will be resumed shortly; this evening, I shall be going to the Komische Oper for the first night of Barrie Kosky’s new production of a Mussorgsky opera. No, unless you know, it is almost certainly not the one you were thinking of: it is The Sorochintsy Fair. More soon…

24 March: Amir Katz (piano), ‘Hommage an Liszt’ (Konzerthaus)

Nocturne in A-flat major, ‘Liebestraum’ no.3, S 541/3

Three Concert Studies, S 144
Two Concert Studies, S 145
Transcendental Studies, S 139

29 March: Grigory Sokolov (piano) (Philharmonie)

Mozart – Sonata in C major, KV 545

Mozart – Fantasia in C minor, KV 475
Mozart – Sonata in C minor, KV 457
Beethoven – Piano Sonata no.27 in E minor, op.90
Beethoven – Piano Sonata no.32 in C minor, op.111

 

 

 

Sokolov - Schubert and Chopin, 4 December 2015

Grosser Saal, Konzerthaus, Vienna

Schubert – Sonata in A minor, D 784

Schubert – Six Moments musicaux, D 780
Chopin – Nocturne in B major, op.32 no.1
Chopin – Nocturne in A-flat major, op.32 no.2
Chopin – Piano Sonata no.2 in B minor, op.35

Grigory Sokolov (piano)

It is customary for any British writer on Grigory Sokolov to lament his absence from our shores. How can one not, when faced with such formidable pianism? As a friend in Vienna mentioned, only too well aware of our authorities’ attitude towards the arts – sport, is of course different – the Austrian Culture Minister would see at his job to sort out whatever visa impediment was preventing a major artists from visiting Vienna. I should be astonished if any of our succession of Culture Secretaries had even heard of Sokolov, let alone cared that British audiences could not hear him. That is wrong, both in principle and, as this recital showed, in practice.

 

Sokolov’s stress or, better, leaning upon the D-sharp, the third note of the Schubert A minor Sonata’s opening phrase, was something one noticed, not for itself but for the formal and emotional propulsion it elicited. From that first phrase, there was struck a note of inexorable tragedy, close to that of Mozart’s piano sonata in the same key. Rhythm, melody, harmony: all were part of an indivisible whole. The second group in this first movement rightly sounded both as continuation and contrast. Trills seemed to have an import such as one might expect in late Beethoven, although their particular quality was quite different. The development section sounded as if poised, or rather developing, in a space between Mozart and Liszt: which, when one thinks about it, is pretty much spot on for Schubert. The recapitulation sounded almost numb, looking forward to Winterreise; and yet, it moved. The Andante showed a similar match of fearlessness and tenderness, whilst it was the sheer strangeness of the finale that initially registered: as if a Beethovenian moto perpetuo deepened by Mozartian chromaticism, before exploding with a fury that was entirely Schubert’s own. That in turn developed in collaboration – competition? – with a heartstopping lyricism that would not have shamed a performance of one of the song cycles. The interplay between such tendencies of the material fascinated and enthralled; above all, it moved.

 

The Moments musicaux, D 780, were in a state of continual becoming (the German Romantic Werden). No one really thinks of these as mere salon pieces; at least, I hope not! They certainly did not sound as such here, as Sokolov welded them into an almost continuous whole. Their developmental qualities are different from those in pieces by Beethoven; here, the development sounded as strong. Smiling through tears, as a moment – or several – between Mozart and Brahms should, the music sounded possessed at times of an almost manic intensity and insistency, without exaggeration. Rhythms were nicely sprung, born of harmonic motion rather than standing against it. Contrasts were musical, not sentimental.

Two Chopin Nocturnes followed the interval: the B major, op.31 no.2, and the A-flat major, op.32 no.2. The B major piece was surprisingly forthright, albeit with greater rubato as it proceeded. I cannot say that I cared for the throwaway fioriture; Chopin’s melodies need, for me at least, to count for more than that. However, the Lisztian way in which a melody passed from one hand to another was quite something to hear. The A-flat Nocturne was taken very seriously, perhaps too seriously, remaining somewhat earthbound. There was, however, no doubting the integrity of the performance. It may not be how I hear the piece, but who cares?

Chopin’s B minor Sonata likewise benefited from sovereign command of line and harmony, insofar as the two may be separated. It was, again, Liszt who came to mind, some of the material edging forward into the realm of his sonata in the same key. And then, chords would seemingly divide, voices taking on lines of their own – in an almost Wagnerian or Schoenbergian fashion. The Scherzo, and again I mean no adverse criticism by this, also sounded somewhat Lisztified – en-Liszted? – yet, in a performance clearly born of such conviction, I was utterly gripped. Much the same might be said of the Funeral March. Its Trio’s lyricism and Sokolov’s touch therein would have melted hearts sterner than mine. Time seemed almost to stand still, and one wished it so. The return of the March was straightforwardly overwhelming. Taken attacca, the finale was possessed of a strangeness that took my mind back to the final movement of the Schubert sonata, except of course that its course is unrelieved here. It sounded as if a single line, almost a Berio Sequenza avant la lettre, transcribed for piano.

Salzburg Festival (5) - Grigory Sokolov: Schubert and Beethoven, 23 August 2013

Grosses Festspielhaus

Schubert – Four Impromptus, D 899

Schubert – Three Piano Pieces, D 946
Beethoven – Piano Sonata no.29 in B-flat major, op.106, ‘Hammerklavier’

 

Grigory Sokolov is truly one of a kind. This was a lengthy recital: beginning at nine o’clock, or rather just after, six (!) encores meant that it concluded, like a performance I heard in Vienna last year, more than three hours later, in this case at ten past midnight. I shall not discuss the encores here, save to say that one of their many pleasures was to remind us that no one alive, and perhaps ever, on whatever instrument, has played Rameau with such distinction. Indeed, the particular combination of strength and ornamental delicacy, though assisted by the eccentric – to put it mildly – regulation of the instrument, is most likely unique anywhere in the world (and perhaps beyond it!)

 

It is a cliché to say that a fine performance of sets such as Schubert’s Four Impromptus, D 899, and the Three Piano Pieces, D 946, will have them sounding as if sonatas in their own right. They will, but such description also misses a great deal of what makes them so singular, and indeed so moving. In Sokolov’s case, however, there is, as it were, a singularity that is at least squared, perhaps raised to the nth degree. The Impromptus certainly covered a broad range of expressive ground, often bringing to mind the surprising degree of affinity between Schubert and Chopin, without ever quite sounding ‘like’ Chopin. The first statement of the march theme in the C minor Impromptu, for instance, might almost, yet not quite, have been one of those enigmatic opening statements in a Nocturne; the ‘not quite’, however, was just as important, for there was a sense of purpose, which, though certainly not lacking in Chopin, would have been of a different variety, more operatic in a sense, less charged with Schubert’s unique developmental alternative path to Beethoven. Transitions between foreboding rhythmic tread and rippling accompaniment at times seemed to speak of Schubert’s Lieder without ever sounding merely ‘derived’ from them. Intriguingly, there were passages, which, whilst certainly not played in any ‘enhanced’ version, sounded as if conceived – and executed – in a twilit zone somewhere between ‘straight’ Schubert and Liszt’s transcriptions of his songs. The lack of sentimentality in the G-flat Impromptu was most welcome; not that it was stark or crystalline, let alone ‘modernistic’; this was not playing that in any sense recalled, say, Pollini, or indeed the often extraordinary degree of kinship one discovers between Schubert and the Second Viennese School. Yet there was a delight in Schubert’s music as music that was perhaps not so wholly removed from such different aesthetics as one might think in the abstract.

 

Both the Impromptus and still more the Three Piano Pieces seemed almost to inhabit a world beyond time. One had a sense of an expansiveness that went beyond the typical ‘heavenly lengths’ of Schubert, and yet which never threatened to pall. It was not because these were slow performances, but rather a matter of somehow experiencing time differently, so that one travelled a musical – and emotional – journey and yet could immediately have embarked upon another. Formal considerations registered, for instance the rondo forms of D 946, yet, despite sectional clarity, there was no danger of falling into the merely episodic. Transitions were somehow implied when not present, and made to delight when they were. Voicing, again doubtless assisted by the regulation of the instrument, was beyond reproach; it did not, however, sound for its own sake, seeming instead a ‘natural’ expression of the works ‘in themselves’.

 

The Hammerklavier Sonata was one of the works I had heard in Vienna. Its performance somewhat puzzled me then, and in many ways did so now, though there was no question of this being the same reading repeated. Again, I wondered whether a more conventionally regulated instrument might have unleashed truer Beethovenian spirit, but that was only really a question in the abstract. I was involved from beginning to end, and did not once find my attention wavering. There was certainly apt scale to the first movement: scale of ambition and of expressive range. Likewise there were oddities, for instance the presentation of the opening left-hand B-flat, both at the very opening and upon its reappearances: it sounded almost as if it were the first beat of the bar, and yet somehow that ambiguity or even infidelity was made to work, and to sound anything less than perverse. The scherzo sounded as a fleeting dream, weirdly unhinged, almost stream of consciousness, yet remaining anchored at least in implied harmonic motion. It was the slow movement, as in Vienna, which ultimately lost me, but more briefly on this occasion, and considerably later on. I am not at all sure how Sokolov did this, and cannot even really describe what I heard, but there was a sense of losing moorings with Beethoven completely; one passage seemed straight out of Chopin, though it was Beethoven’s notes that were being played. It is certainly not how I should always want this sonata to sound, yet I cannot deny the fascination. The finale was perhaps a little more Apollonian than it had been last year; Beethovenian discontinuities, however, disrupted all-too-easy characterisations. The clarity of Beethoven’s counterpoint simply had to be heard to be believed, though onward drive was every bit as impressive.

 

What a scandal, then, it is that UK immigration regulations mean that one must travel abroad to hear Sokolov (not that, for a minute, I mind being in Salzburg!) I strongly recommend a reading of this article by James Rhodes, whether or no one should agree with the contentious headline. The greatest sadness of all would perhaps be that the Prime Minister, Home Secretary, et al., will most likely never have heard of Grigory Sokolov, let alone heard him in concert.  

Sokolov - Rameau, Mozart, and Beethoven, 5 December 2012

Großer Saal, Konzerthaus, Vienna

Rameau – Suite in D minor/major, from Pièces de clavecin avec une méthode sur la méchanique des doigts

Mozart – Piano Sonata no.8 in A minor, KV 310/300d
Beethoven – Piano Sonata no.29 in B-flat major, op.106, ‘Hammerklavier’

Grigory Sokolov (piano)

 

 

I shall start at the end, in order not to talk about the end. There is so much to say about this programme as advertised that almost the least extraordinary thing about it was Grigory Sokolov’s performance of no fewer than six encores, a 7.30 p.m. recital concluding more than three hours later. Furthermore, I shall resist the temptation even to name those encores – and not only because I have no idea what one of them was. For an Englishman, to hear Sokolov at all is a thing of wonder, New Labour’s visa regulations, perpetuated by the present government, meaning that he no longer performs in London or indeed anywhere else in our sceptr’d isle. Vienna, Paris, Rome, many other cities, yet not ours; this was therefore my first encounter with a pianist many consider to be one of the finest and certainly one of the most original alive.

 

There was something that one might justly call genius in his performance of Rameau’s D minor Suite, not just the finest performance I have heard of any of Rameau’s keyboard music, but the finest performance of any of his music I have yet to hear – and suspect that I ever will. ‘Les Tendres plaintes’, the first movement, perfectly set out Sokolov’s stall. Rameau’s decoration was both meaningful and delicate, allied to, indeed born of, a fine understanding of harmonic progression. (Those who treat the writer of the Traité de l’harmonie as an effete spinner of allegedly ‘stylish’ melodic inconsequentialities could not be further from the truth; alas that is how we almost hear him, especially in the age of ‘authenticity’.) A sturdy command of rhythm, including harmonic rhythm, characterised ‘Les Niais de Sologne’, which yet remained wonderfully catchy, as did its two doubles. Repeated notes offered a masterclass in the striking thereof – aided, admittedly, by the highly idiosyncratic regulation of Sokolov’s Steinway. Most impressive of all, however, throughout these three movements was the cumulative power achieved, again born as it necessarily must be of true harmonic understanding. ‘Les Soupirs’ provided languor that was both authentically – in the true sense – Ramellian and suggestive of the attraction of such music for Debussy and Ravel. Prélude à l’après-midi did not sound so very far away. Strength in the ‘ornaments’ showed them to be anything but merely ornamental; once again, cumulative power was ultimately the thing. (Unless, that is, one were to count the first of several mobile telephone interruptions to the night’s proceedings. Appalling!) Mesmerising digital dexterity, always at the service of the music, characterised ‘La Joyeuse’, which was followed by a declamatory reading of ‘La Follette’, rhetorical in a proper sense – as opposed to the inability to phrase that some seem to think qualifies as a virtue. ‘L’Entretien des Muses’ benefited likewise, with more than a hint of operatic drama. It emerged as the suite’s profound ‘black pearl’. ‘Les Tourbillons’ demonstrated beyond doubt Sokolov’s ability to forge continuity of line out of apparent discontinuity. Doubtless this was partly a matter of sheer happenstance, but I had been reading some remarks by Schoenberg on Mozart earlier in the day, and was reminded very much of them both here and in the performance of the subsequent Mozart sonata to which Schoenberg refers:

When I composed my Fourth String Quartet I said this time I must compose like Mozart does it, without looking at all whether I see relations or not, juxtaposing ideas. This principle I had conceived before, but this time I went very straight with this. And this is what Mozart does; in the middle of a theme he will interrupt or abandon his motifs and juxtapose new thematic formulations. We have it so clearly in the A minor [piano sonata]. The characteristic for Mozart is this interruption, I would not be sure to contend that this is a higher or a more primitive technique [than Beethoven, inter alia]. It is difficult to evaluate this aesthetically. I think it derived from his dramatic technique.

 

A sense of drama and once again of dramatically-forged continuity was to the fore in 'Les Cyclopes'. The delicately grave beauty of 'Le Lardon' gave way to superbly judged harmonic progression in the closing 'La Boîteuse'. Married to appreciation of a truly outstanding performance was the sad realisation of how poorly served Rameau has been by performers who fail to appreciate that harmonic understanding is just as important in his music as in that of Mozart and Beethoven.

 

Mozart’s A minor sonata came next. The first movement plunged us immediately into a great drama, not hard-driven from without, but a drama that arose from the material; Mozart’s minor-mode daemon spoke and told its story, without a hint of being forced to do so.  Passagework was as fluid as one could reasonably hope for, truly ‘flowing like oil’. And again, continuity arose out of discontinuity. The upward scale that initiates – perhaps better, provokes – the recapitulation summarised in miniature the virtues of Sokolov’s performance; I am not sure that I have ever heard it sound so dramatically meaningful. (Well, perhaps from Barenboim, in his very different way.) A cavil? Even Sokolov could not make the second repeat work. Anyway... Command of line was very much to the fore once again in the slow movement. Incidentals – at least were one to take a Schenkerian approach – such as repeated notes and trills impressed, but the greater whole did so still more. I have heard this movement sound more aria-like, and in general might well wish to do so, but I cannot recall it sounding more pianistic. The full dynamic range of the piano – again, at least as set up – was employed sparingly, but with powerful effect when the extremes of fortissimo and una corda were heard. Balanced against that must be the strange effect of hearing very strong overtones during the finale, on account of the instrument’s regulation: C sharp against that crucial third degree of the scale, C natural. Otherwise, that movement, in which textures can readily become muddy, especially in the left hand, emerged clean and yet ambivalent, as Mozart’s expressively dialectical demands require. The sonata, then, was played as the masterpiece that is; its finale emerged as a true Mozartian finale, not hankering to be Beethoven, not unduly weighty, but necessary.

 

The Hammerklavier Sonata received a performance that was certainly extraordinary but that was, to my mind at least, far more problematical. Perhaps I have become too hidebound by what I have already heard, though I flatter myself that I am open to performances as different as those by Schnabel and Pollini. In that company, Sokolov was more ‘interesting’ than convincing. For one thing, I felt that the modifications made to his Steinway were more of an obstacle to unleashing Beethovenian force, not least since a preoccupation with sound at times seemed to thwart the line so apparent in the first half; true, miracles of voicing could be heard, but to what end? That said, and irrespective of whether this were the (more or less Romantic) intent – I am not at all sure that it was – the radical discontinuities of Beethoven’s musical material reasserted themselves in true Adornian style; a performance that was merely mediocre could never have achieved that. Those discontinuities were still more apparent in the scherzo, thematic – almost a- or anti-thematic – ghosts of the Eroica and all. Chopinesque rumblings contributed rather than distracted. The slow movement opened with a pathos that I found impossible not to consider Schubertian. (Whether one thinks that appropriate is another matter; perhaps it is beside the point.) This was certainly not a Beethoven who looked forward to Boulez; but ‘we’ll always have Pollini’. Often closer to Les Adieux than the late quartets, save of course for inevitable dislocation, Sokolov’s performance was fascinating, strangely compelling. It was Romantic, strange, again often Chopinesque, not least in its cantilena; it approached the bizarre, indeed arguably achieved it. But in its way it was captivating, even if one would never wish to hear it that way again. Moreover, one should remember that this music is bizarre. Occasional clumsiness in the finale did not matter; it is pretty much to be expected. The performance united – and disunited – those virtues and oddities heard in the first three movements. At one point I thought the music was about to metamorphose into Mussorgsky, at another Scarlatti; yet, another telephonic intervention notwithstanding, my attention never wavered.