Stephen Kovacevich - Beethoven and Schubert, 16 July 2012

Wigmore Hall

Beethoven – Piano Sonata no.5 in C minor, op.10 no.1

Beethoven – Piano Sonata no.31 in A-flat major, op.110
Schubert – Piano Sonata in B-flat major, D 960


Sad to say, this must rank as one of the most disappointing piano recitals I have heard in quite some time. Whether Stephen Kovacevich’s pianism has deteriorated, or whether the recording studio has worked wonders, it is difficult for me to say, this being the first time I have heard him give a full recital, but there were but a few glimmers of something less than dispiriting here.

The Beethoven C minor sonata, op.10 no.1, opened brusquely, more Presto than Molto allegro e con brio. There was no let up for the second subject either. More worryingly, a good amount of passagework was blurred. Though there was a sort of defiance to the performance that might just about be called Beethovenian, humour, let alone charm, were notable only by their absence. This was Beethoven alla Toscanini, albeit without the technical control. The opening of the slow movement was refreshing, indeed quite beautifully voiced. Phrasing soon stiffened, however, suffocating the music. A greater line was absent, not through the more frequently-encountered pianistic habit of pulling the music around to no greater end, but through a literalness so dogged that it apparently prevented Kovacevich from joining the dots. Harmonic jolts registered with force, it must be admitted, and some phrases were lifted up from utter mundanity: a frustrating, tantalising sign of what might have been. The finale benefited from a return of the first movement’s insistence, but that all too readily tipped over into brutalisation. Technical insecurities were, however, more disturbing, some passagework again fluffed or skated over.

There was promise to the opening bars of op.110, beguiling in their apparent simplicity. Yet Kovacevich again tended to skate over some of the faster passages. For the most part, the music meandered along nicely enough, sometimes vehemently, but to say that that is not enough for Beethoven would register as the understatement of the year. The scherzo veered, sadly, between the disjunct and the straightforwardly incoherent. Beethoven’s Klagender Gesang, if hardly intense or otherwise moving, at least did not fall too short technically. The first appearance of the fugue was better still, voiced and directed meaningfully and sounding for the most part as if it were actually piano music. The return of the slow material, however, was oddly halting, and the fugue in its second incarnation was reduced to muddy incoherence. Thank goodness I was not having to take dictation, for I should have failed miserably to discern vast swathes of the notes.

That said, there was hope, following the interval. The first movement of Schubert's final sonata opened with considerable sensitivity, not least to inner voices, though ‘sensitive’ is certainly not the word I should use to describe the weird combination of ultra-abrupt, even brutal, curtailment of the left-hand quaver in bar 9 whilst permitting the right hand’s chord to continue to resonate almost indefinitely. The same thing happened in the recapitulation – there was no exposition repeat – so it was definitely intended, but to my ears at least it sounded very odd indeed. There remained many instances of touch hardening and of undue brusqueness, but at least there was to be gleaned greater Beethovenian purpose to the development section than there had been to any of Beethoven’s own developments. If Schubert’s music did not move me once – a disturbing thing to say about this work – the performance nevertheless gave a sense of a greater whole. The slow movement was certainly not sentimentalised; it was faster than I can ever recall hearing, or at least so it sounded. Again, in context, that was something of a relief, though no depths were plumbed. As for the scherzo, it was so rushed as to be garbled, denying any real impression of what the music might be, let alone mean. It was faultlessly metronomic, if that is your thing, but the trio lurched around as if the metronome were malfunctioning. Kovacevich’s tempo for the finale was more reasonable, and potentially manageable, but his performance was so heavy-handed beyond belief. The rondo theme was bereft of light and shade, and so it went on and on, dogged by quite the wrong sort of grim insistence.

Graffin, Kovacevich, Mørk, et al. - Beethoven, Brahms, Schoenberg, and Debussy, 25 June 2011

Wigmore Hall

Beethoven – Cello Sonata in D major, op.102 no.2
Brahms – Piano Trio no.3 in C minor, op.101
Schoenberg – Phantasy, for violin and piano, op.47
Schoenberg (arr. Webern) – Chamber Symphony no.1, op.9
Debussy (arr. David Matthews) – Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

Philippe Graffin (violin)
Truls Mørk (violoncello)
Juliette Hurel (flute)
Chen Halevi (clarinet)
Stephen Kovacevich (piano, crotales)
Claire Désert, Marisa Gupta (piano)


This was a delightful programme of music from the Consonances Festival at Saint-Nazaire, whose twentieth anniversary was also celebrated here in London. Though Philippe Graffin is founder and director, his collegiality was immediately demonstrated in the opening piece: Beethoven’s D major Cello Sonata, op.102 no.2, performed by Truls Mørk and Stephen Kovacevich. Kovacevich’s Beethovenian credentials need no introduction; he was on fine form, announcing his depth of tone from the opening bars. Both players presented a first movement full of vigour, without the slightest hint of ‘period’ restraint or preciousness: Beethoven for today, as he must be, not for an imaginary museum. There was beautifully hushed playing where necessary; the scope and gradation of the final crescendo had to be heard to be believed. Motivic working was very much to the fore, preparing the way for Brahms. The slow movement proved both soulful and weighty, for Kovacevich and Mørk – not to forget Beethoven – were speaking of serious things. It passed in a long breath, conceived and executed as a whole. The finale took us back to Bach, of course, though forward to Bach always seems a more apt way of thinking; equally notable, however, was the scherzo-like, or rather scherzo-plus character imparted. Strong, indeed overwhelming, rhythmic impetus was the order of the day, balanced or rather questioned by the ‘late’ almost-but-not-quite-fragmentary quality of the writing. Form, likewise, was externalised and attacked, as if in preparation for the truly late Missa solemnis. There were occasions here and in the following piece where Kovacevich did not always hit all of the right notes, but the spirit was present, just as in the best of Daniel Barenboim’s Beethoven.

Graffin joined the musicians for Brahms’s C minor Piano Trio, which received a turbulently Romantic, not necessarily ‘late’ performance, especially in its opening Allegro energico. The full-blooded sound was a wonder in itself, but there was nothing narcissistic about this urgent, probing account. Ghostly strangeness announced an immediate transformation of mood in the scherzo. Now we truly heard Brahms the Schoenbergian Progressive, the intensity of motivic working we had already experienced in Beethoven given a further turn or two of the screw. Most noteworthy of all was the passing and development of material between parts, not only a splendid indication of true chamber-playing, but clearly prophetic of Webern. One could say much the same about the sense of concision: it is there in the music, never a note wasted, of course, but the players really made it sound. The final two movements presented a dialectic between near-imploding difficulty and Beethovenian, plain-spoken gruffness. (What excellent sense the programming made!) Yet there was a guiding thread through the Brahmsian labyrinth, that of harmonic rhythm. Intensity always came from within and was all the greater for that.

If the first-half performances were excellent, the Schoenberg Phantasy, op.47, which opened the second half, received as fine a performance as I have ever heard, arguably better. Quite why violin-and-piano duos are not queuing around the corner to perform this masterly work, I genuinely do not understand, but then I have never understood the aversion to Schoenberg’s music in certain quarters. One needs excellent, preferably great, performances, and one needs to listen. Graffin and Claire Désert presented a panorama of Schoenberg within the piece’s relatively brief span. Haunted by Brahms, and by old Vienna – those waltz rhythms that will not die – this was equally a forthright, forward-looking, declamatory Schoenberg. Graffin offered superlatively centred playing, revealing the work’s kinship with the meaningful, indeed hyper-meaningful virtuosity of the scandalously neglected Violin Concerto. Both players proved unfailingly alert to rhythm and harmony. Most importantly, their performance sang, as Schoenberg’s music must (even when it is spoken!) The Phantasy emerged as an Erwartung-like monodrama with violin as soloist, now heard through the emotional prism of the slightly earlier String Trio, and a worthy successor to that unqualified masterpiece. This was a truly outstanding performance.

Webern’s arrangement of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony welcomed Mørk back to the stage, with newcomers, flautist Juliette Hurel and clarinettist Chen Halevi also joining Graffin and Désert. I am in two minds about this reduction, which it really is, for one hears little or nothing of Webern’s compositional personality. Schoenberg would doubtless never have allowed such free rein. It is peculiar to hear the first note from violin, though flute, cello, and clarinet soon reminded us of the ‘correct’ timbres for much of their material. What we hear is really the chamber symphony edged back into chamber music, more Brahms than Strauss. One can only pity the poor pianist, having to negotiate both super-Brahmsian textures and an excess, even by Schoenberg’s standards, of melodic profusion. Désert accomplished that as well as could be reasonably expected, arguably better. The tempi adopted were often breakneck, though not in the relaxed tension – a typical Schoenbergian dialectic – of the slow movement, yet even when they recalled, perhaps even exceeded, the young Boulez with his Domaine musical players, the performance was so full of life that it never felt unduly driven. Indeed, one appreciated anew, despite the imperfect instrumentation, what a life-affirming piece of music this is, every bit as much as a symphony by Haydn. There are occasions where, I think, the arrangement does not really work, not least the strangely Ivesian textures at the end of the scherzo, yet there could be no faulting the performance, whose fullness of sound made one wonder what on earth a full performance of the chamber symphony as composed would sound like.

After that, David Matthews’s new arrangement of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune allowed some paradoxical cooling in its languid warmth. Marisa Gupta joined the band as second pianist – Matthews writes for piano duet – and Kovacevich returned to play the peculiar part for crotales (antique cymbals). I am not sure that the latter added anything very much; they had something of a drowning effect when employed. Nor am I convinced that the arrangement itself is of particular interest, though it does its job well enough. Again, it seems more of a reduction than a reimagining. Benno Sachs’s transcription has obvious Second Viennese School lineage in such a context. The performance was good, though, Hurel’s flute whetting the appetite for a rendition of Debussy’s original.