It’s reassuring that music critics wrote drivel 200 years ago. Wilhelm von Lenz, one of Beethoven’s early biographers, described the Waldstein Sonata as the pianistic equivalent of the Eroica Symphony. It gets worse: he described the Appassionata Sonata as “undoubtedly Beethoven’s darkest and most aggressive work.” Jumppanen’s readings of both are unexceptional and unexceptionable, though the finale of the Appassionata is a great deal more aggressive than that of Arrau or Barenboim. What interested me more was the Opus 10 trilogy of early sonatas, which are frequently overshadowed by the middle and late period masterpieces. Both the first and second in this opus are, on the face of it, backward-looking works, the first minus a minuet the second lacking a slow movement but, nevertheless, containing a myriad of suggestions that something marvelous is afoot. Jumppanen captures the kaleidoscopic moods of both these works, especially the Haydnesque presto of the Second. It’s in the four movement Third Sonata that we see the huge strides Beethoven had taken even within the same opus: the Largo e mesto, surely the most tragic and heartfelt of all his ‘early’ works. Jumppanen spins out the final bars here into a passage of exquisite agony, itself…

Angela Hewitt, as they used to say in old-school classical CD reviews, is currently at the peak of her pianistic powers, and having just released a well-upholstered and characteristically thoughtful recording of Bach’s The Art of Fugue now turns her attention to Franz Liszt – his sempiternal B Minor Sonata placed alongside the earlier Dante Sonata and Petrarca Sonnets. B Minor was a significant key for both Bach and Liszt, and Liszt’s mass of sound integrates fugal grandeur within a narrative framework that delights in extreme shifts of mood; harmonic non sequiturs and melodic flashbacks are glued together by rhythmic markers in the sand. With fingers expertly primed to unpick the inner workings of Liszt’s fugal writing, Hewitt is also on top of the overall trajectory of Liszt’s large-scale dramatics. Never ostentatious or showy, her mission, apparently, is to show that the B Minor Sonata adds up to more than a sequence of grandstanding set pieces. Hewitt fesses up in her booklet notes that when, in her teens, she first encountered the Sonata she came away thinking “what an awful piece,” but she enters its world with the zeal of a reformed smoker. Could some of the descending passagework near…

Future Makers claims to be “Australia’s most holistic artist development initiative for professional musicians today.” Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The annual APRA AMCOS Awards celebrating “diversity and vibrancy” sees increase to first time nominees this year. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

Baroque specialist, harpsichordist and pioneering conductor of Handel opera passes at 80. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

From Scriabin to Chopin, Wang dazzles with poetry, musicianship and bags of ‘wow’ factor.

★★★★★ When I hear Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigam play Beethoven on period fortepianos I think that, quite honestly, performing the great man’s music on a modern grand piano is an aesthetic crime of some magnitude – right up there with colourised Laurel & Hardy films and microwaving chicken. Elsewhere in this issue, it’s true, I lavish praise on the fourth instalment of Jonathan Biss’s ongoing cycle of Beethoven Piano Sonatas, praise that is sincere and unquestionably deserved. But Brautigam’s attention to historical form is such that three separate fortepianos have been recalled from the subs’ benches in order to trace the evolution of the instrumental hardware with which Beethoven himself necessarily wrestled. Paul McNulty’s copy of an 1802 fortepiano serves Sonatas 1 through 18, its timbral delicacies and coarse-grained tuning temperament representing a complete game changer. Take, for example, the Moonlight, Beethoven’s most used and abused sonata, lacquered often with cod-Romantic rubato. In Brautigam’s hands we’re reconnected with its eerie oddities – when… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The first three volumes of his Beethoven cycle was released by Onyx, and now Jonathan Biss issues Volume Four via his own label.

★★★☆☆ Ferrucio Busoni (1866-1924) was the outstanding piano virtuoso of his time. Performance activity interfered with his composing, much to his annoyance, but he produced highly individual works. He also made transcriptions of music by Bach, mainly of organ works. Two such pieces are played here: the Prelude and Triple Fugue in E Flat (St. Anne), and a Fantasia after Bach (1909). The original works, all from Busoni’s later years as he suppressed most of his earlier music, are the exquisite Ravelian Nuit de Noël, the Prélude et étude en arpèges, Variations on a Prelude of Chopin, and Toccata: Prelude, Fantasia and Chaconne. The Toccata was his final composition, a fine example of his unique harmonic sense, as well as the tremendous technical difficulty of his piano music. His Chopin Variations of 1922 give Brahms’s Paganini Variations a run for their money. American pianist Jeni Slotchiver is a Busoni specialist. This is the third disc in her series; earlier issues contain the slightly better known Elegies and Sonatinas. Some unevenness in descending arpeggios aside (in the Etude), she undoubtedly has the necessary technique, and her booklet note attests to… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

★★★★☆ With the passing of Gustav Leonhardt, elder statesman of period keyboard performance, the mantle passes to Ton Koopman, a treasure of the early music scene for the last 30 years. His witty approach to a potentially sober repertoire has charmed and illuminated, with several tours of this country and a discography treasured by connoisseurs. His complete set of the elder Bach’s organ works is one of my desert island discs. As one of many cast-offs from the major labels we can thank Challenge Classics for continuing to record him and this latest release is a delight. Koopman’s musical personality is tailor-made for CPE Bach’s free-wheeling invention and whacky sense of fantasy. His experiments in period keyboard techniques has always given his playing an extra degree of air and space so CPE’s rhetorical stop-starts and flourishes have extra point and lift. The younger Bach didn’t write much organ music but the six sonatas are delightful works in his mature empfindsamkeit style. Koopman has recorded them on a magnificent restored organ once owned by Princess Amalia of Prussia. She owned a manuscript of these works, so it’s possible the… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already…

Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961) was an ambiguous presence in Australian music, both as a man and a composer. A sensational concert pianist in his youth (though not one to take other composers’ score markings too seriously), he befriended Grieg and Delius, and achieved considerable success in America (eventually he took US citizenship). Post-World War II he became the forgotten figure described by Barry Humphries in his memoirs: shuffling around Melbourne, struggling to maintain a Grainger museum that housed his manuscripts, home-made “music machines” and a large collection of whips and sex toys. Grainger saw himself as the future of Australian music. Certainly, he wrote a great number of musical arrangements, or ‘rambles’ as he called them (such an English word!). Most of the 61 tracks on these discs are arrangements of British folksongs, like Shepherd’s Hey, My Robin is to the Greenwood Gone, and famously English Country Gardens. They recall a world of Empire Day, folk dancing, and bland radio programmes for schools that was in its death throes when I was a kid. Imaginatively written for the piano though Grainger’s arrangements are, and as lovingly performed as they are here by Australian pianist Leslie Howard, those associations render them……

We catch up with the iconoclastic Chinese pianist taking music by the scruff of its neck.