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…

A few years ago, I interviewed the London-based Elias Quartet about plans to tour and record Beethoven’s complete string quartets. A few days later the publication that commissioned the interview folded and, as I write, our conversation remains untranscribed: lost words of wisdom. But one section, where we cracked into the true nature of spontaneity in music as familiar as Beethoven’s, rewound through my mind as I listened to these deftly articulate and noticeably personal performances of Op. 18 No 4, Op. 74 The Harp and Op. 130, complete with Grosse Fuge finale – all recorded live at the Wigmore Hall in 2014. The first thing you notice is the sound. Do I hear residual traces of the old-school charm of, say, the Busch or Borodin Quartets? Quite possibly, but then again this playing is perpetually and effortlessly contemporary. Unlike Riccardo Chailly’s extreme-sports take on the symphonies, the quartet’s tempi stick within a narrow bandwidth. But their performance of Op. 130 aspires to something quasi orchestral, their muscular, pile-driver tone motoring the Grosse Fuge forwards in time, the crystal-cut clarity of line against line never negating their meticulous plotting of the music’s kaleidoscope of inner harmonic tensions. You are reminded……

★★★★★ 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.

  This is smashing programming: Beethoven’s last piano concerto and final piano sonata performed by two Decca war horses. Beethoven dedicated the concerto (as well as the Op. 111 Sonata) to Archduke Rudolf; the imperial epithet was coined by his English publisher (not the first or last time a publisher ‘re-interpreted’ a composer’s intentions!). In the context of a work in E Flat, the curious key relationship of the nocturnal second movement in B emphasises the movement’s reflective and subdued character. Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire first performed it in 1957 at the age of 12. Now 70, Freire changes gear effortlessly between rhythmic vitality and deliquescent lyricism in the prolonged opening movement. The Leipzig Gewandhaus occasionally seems more brawny in interpretation of this audacious music than Freire. The Piano Sonata No 32 arrived about ten years after the Emperor Concerto and falls into Beethoven’s late period. Not uniquely it is in two movements: a sonata-allegro followed by a set of variations including the famous proto-boogie-woogie third variation. The rhetorical vigour of the first movement comes off with genius. The herculean second movement is elegant, Freire poetic… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber?…

While the theory is decades old, the new site claims that Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonatas contain African polyrhythms.

A fine Sydney day out for Melbourne’s liveliest string quartet. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

The chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra reflects on coming together in harmony.

Onyx’s first installment from Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires shows how foolish Deutsche Grammophon were to let her go. Pires is unafraid to take risks. Her view of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto not only enters into a pianist-composer dialogue, but also probes our relationship as consumers of this (too) regularly recorded masterwork. With Daniel Harding and the SRSO resonating in empathy, Pires stretches the opening movement to just short of 20 minutes which, although not unprecedented, blows air through the structure, allowing us time to look around, to reacquaint ourselves with what we know from a slightly oblique angle. Some of my reviewer colleagues have suggested that at this tempo Pires and Harding let the momentum droop, but personally I hear liberation within their deliberation. Pires’ analytically detailed playing tunnels deep inside the poetic soul of Beethoven’s score; no glossing over his abrupt changes of mood, the confrontation between soloist and orchestra in the slow movement given Stravinskian objectivity – although you do wish the Finale could have been a little more peppery and genuinely vivace. The Third Concerto is as bold as brass too, the first movement peaking… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe…

Australia's fantastic four celebrates 20 years with Ligeti, Stanhope and Beethoven.

The May issue of Limelight explores Beethoven’s 1808 marathon concert, but how well do you know Herr van Beethoven?

Where did Ludwig go wrong? Perhaps the programming was to blame.