Beethoven's Piano Sonatas

[PaulSC]

I listened to Goodyears' middle sonata set the last couple of days (Op. 27/28/31) and was mightily impressed, both interpretively and technically. Very intense in places, yet he is able to bring out the inherent humor in many of these works. The recording quality, criticized by reviewers, didn't bother me much and the ear easily adjusts. I liked his playing so much I ordered the late sonata set.  Apparantly he plays the Hammerklavier at Beethoven's tempo markings, something Schnabel did but couldn't bring off technically. Maybe Goodyear can.  I assume he will record all the sonatas, which I look forward to.  I'd even attend a marathan concert of all 32, should he choose to bring it to the Pacific Northwest.

I'm a fan of the Goodyear's late sonatas, and I like what I hear in previews of the new set. It's on my wish list. In the earlier recording, I would only fault him for lacking a really convincing legato — sometimes passage work seems over articulated. But it's never unlistenable, just takes some getting used to...

[Fred]

Best 111 I have ever heard (until the next one I listen to) - Novitskaya - What a tragedy she retired so early

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtsWnXjY3k4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0TYcZg1GsM

[kishnevi]

Amazon gives this a release date of May 12, although I first saw at MDT and therefore assume it is already available in the UK, or will be available sooner than in the US.
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[Oldnslow]

Yes, I just ordered the Arrau set from Presto at a very good price introductory price ($50), and it is available in early April. About time these famous performances became available again. I used to have the LP set.

[Holden]

Amazon gives this a release date of May 12, although I first saw at MDT and therefore assume it is already available in the UK, or will be available sooner than in the US.
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So what vintage are these recordings? How do they compare with those on the EMI Icons box set?

[Scion7]

Pollini's 1977 DG release of Op.111 #32 & Op.101 #28.   This was one of a series of deluxe
LP issues DG were doing for then-superstar Pollini.  The playing is immaculate, cannot over-
recommend this one.  Haven't heard the CD, but hopefully the engineers captured the great
sound that the LP masters have.  Gramophone Record Award 1977 - INSTRUMENTAL BEETHOVEN. PIANO SONATAS. Maurizio Pollini (piano). DG 2740 166 (three records, nas). Reviewed January 1978.
Piano Sonatas: No. 27 in E minor, Op. 90; No. 28 in A major, Op. 101; No. 29 in B flat major, Op. 106, "Hammerklavier"; No. 30 in E major, Op. 109; No. 31 in A flat major, Op. 110; No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111.

     from Gramophone  March 1978:

BEETHOVEN. Piano Sonatas: No. 28 In A major, C) Op. 101; No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111 (2530 870).
From 2740 166 (1/78).

But Pollini's is a marvellous disc, and as I indicated in my first review, he is given truthful and vivid recorded sound and the discs have impeccable surfaces. Collectors will find both records give profound musical satisfaction. ~R.L.

     from Gramophone:

Beethoven Awareness Month
New York radio station WQXR pays tribute to the composer

For example, Maurizio Pollini's intense and focused Op 111 was my clear first choice from the start.

     from Gramophone July 1990:
BEETHOVEN. LATE PIANO SONATAS. Maurizio Pollini (p1). DG ® CD 429 569/7020H (two discs, oas: 63 and 62 minutes: AAD). From 2740 166 (1/78).

This is precisely Pollini's greatest strength in his GRAMOPHONE Award-winning set. Not only can he stand up to the accumulated momentum, but he can also build on it so as to leave the impression of one huge exhalation of creative breath. Baren boim may probe even more deeply in the Hammerklavier slow movement, and his recording has a richness and translucency the earlier DG cannot match; but Pollini's controlled vehemence is without rival in the outer movements, and though he does not get right to the bottom of Op. 101's poetry, his far-sighted phrasing and paragraphing is again remarkable (hear the build-up to the finale recapitulation and resist it if you can!).

In the last three sonatas there are others who stop to peer deeper into some of the psychic chasms, but Pollini's mastery of integration and continuous growth, and his ability to hold potentially conflicting musical demands in balance, are again sources of wonder. All other things being equal, I would prefer a tempo scheme for the variations of Op. 111 closer to the letter of the score, but in terms of the qualitiesjust mentioned, who is Pollini's equal? Certainly not Ashkenazy or Goode, whose two-disc sets of all five late sonatas (for Decca and Nonesuch/WEA respectively) nevertheless offer rich rewards of their own. There are some small touches of pre-echo in Op. 111, but otherwise nothing to distract from the exalted quality of the music and the playing.  ~D.J.F.

           from Gramophone March 1978:

BEETHOVEN. Piano Sonatas Nos. 28-32. Pollini. DG 3371 033 (three cassettes, nas, £13-50). Discs reviewed 1/78.

"Make no mistake, this is playing of the highest order of mastery", said RL in his disc review, and one need add little more except to agree that the Hammerklavier is "simply staggering". And the tapes are marvellous in their own right, offering some of the most natural 1621 piano tone I have yet heard on disc or tape. The richness of sonority is thrilling, the upper outline clean without being hard. Not to be missed. The Hannnerklavier is also released separately on 3300 869, Sonatas Nos. 28 and 32 on 3300 870; the coupling of Sonatas Nos. 30 and 31 has been available for some time (3300 645). The single cassettes cost k4. 50 each.   ~I.M.

[Scion7]

Another DG LP of the 1977 Gramophone Record Award set.  Again, cannot over-recommend it.

      from Gramophone  March 1976:

BEETHOVEN. Piano Sonatas: No. 30 in E major, Op. 109; No. 31 in A flat major, Op. 110. Maurizio PoIBM. DG 2530 645 (3.25).

I approached this disc with some trepidation. Pollini belongs to the same pianistic bloodgroup as Michelangeli, and supreme perfectionist as he is Michelangeli has always seemed to me miscast in Beethoven. So what a relief to play through both sonatas—without initially stopping to make comparisons—and to find myself much moved by their noble purity and truth as well as bowled over by the quality of the pianism.
But that said, let me add at once that Pollini's Beethoven is not the kind to make "strong men with whiskers brush away a silent tear" (to quote one of my favourite Vaughan Williams remarks). Anyone for whom the intensely introspective Arrau (on Philips) is the ideal could well find Pollini too objective. The amount of unused space on each side of the disc is proof of his preference for keeping things on the move instead of trying to wring the last drops of expression out of every detail. It was hardly surprising to find him a good deal brisker than Arrau in the Prestissimo of Op. 109 (Pollini's dotted crotchet is around 84 as against Arrau's 72). But it is suite extraordinary to compare the two players in the fourth variation of the finale. Arrau, seeking the 'sublime', lingers lovingly over every note (at about a quaver equals 84) while Pollini (at about a quaver equals 126) refuses to let sentiment impede the flow. Pollini's shaping of this movement as a whole is masterly, with a great sense of climax in the last variation before sinking back into the profound peace of the theme itself. unadorned, at the end.
The A flat Sonata brings such strong drama in the contrasts of the second movement (Allegro molto), such intimate pathos in the Arioso (albeit not lingered over) and such a great resurgence of strength in the fugues that it is misleading to describe the performance as 'Apollinian'. Yet how else to try and convey the almost classical discipline and purity of tone and style with which such wealth of feeling is expressed. Purity. That's the inescapable word, and it applies to the recorded tone no less than the playing.    ~J.O.C.

[George]

Amazon gives this a release date of May 12, although I first saw at MDT and therefore assume it is already available in the UK, or will be available sooner than in the US.
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Anyone know if this is a remaster of the Philips set? And why the concertos are not included?

[mc ukrneal]

Anyone know if this is a remaster of the Philips set? And why the concertos are not included?

Think so. Timings look to be nearly identical.

[kishnevi]

Anyone know if this is a remaster of the Philips set? And why the concertos are not included?

Given their usual procedures,  this is merely a re-issue of a previous mastering, and IIRC they've already issued a box in this series with all the concertos (ie, piano, violin, triple), although I'm blessed if I remember who the performers are, and this series seems to be planned with the idea of not having alternate performances.

[Todd]

I'm guessing the Arrau cycle is a straight reissue of the 60s cycle.  Why no concertos, I don't know.  If this turns out to be the later, digital cycle, I'm all over it.

EDIT: HMV Japan lists it as the 1960s cycle, with a release data of 3/31/12.

[Opus106]

Think so. Timings look to be nearly identical.

But is it remastered?

[Todd]

But is it remastered?

No indications that it is.  It's part of the budget Collector's series, so I'd bet it's not.

[Antoine Marchand]

Amazon gives this a release date of May 12, although I first saw at MDT and therefore assume it is already available in the UK, or will be available sooner than in the US.
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I have seen what I guess it's the same set (from the 60s) for several months on the Italian Amazon (I haven't revised another e-stores):

[asin]B005MF0ZNU[/asin]

http://www.amazon.it/gp/product/B005MF0ZNU/ref=s9_simh_gw_p15_d0_g15_i1?pf_rd_m=A11IL2PNWYJU7H&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0ADMP8ZXH0MGE4D5DPE0&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=214853547&pf_rd_i=426865031

The asking price is great, even adding shipping and handling costs.

[Todd]

The darned Japanese!  Besides cycles I already knew about and wanted to get - namely Shoko Sugitani, Kazune Shimizu, and Takahiro Sonoda's Evica cycle - looks like two new ones are available.  Ichiro Nodaira has a complete cycle and Diabelli out on 11 discs, and Yusuke Kikuchi's final installment comes out next month.  The big problem is price.  Importing from Japan is mighty expensive these days. 

And Mr Nodaira also has a Mozart cycle and WTC to consider.  Argh!

[Oldnslow]

I assume the new budget Arrau set is from the 60's, though I note it includes all the variations, which I thought were only done later for Phillips. Todd, I also did not know Arrau did a complete sonata cycle later for Phillips in addition to the 60's set. Is this true?. I only recall that he redid a few, including a Waldstein/109 CD from the 80's I think, along with the Diabellis.  Prior to this new release of the 60's set, they were only available in an expensive set which included the concertos (I think with Haitink) that has been long out of print and carries astronomical high prices on the used market, so this new budget reissue of the 60's set is most welcome, whether or not it is remastered (it might be if they are using the remasters already done for the pricey set).

[Scion7]

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  Another excellent choice.  The No.26 recording supposedly is from February 1972, but the ç on the label says 1971.  Shrugs.
Brendel recorded three Beethoven cycles.  The Seventies cycle is the middle one and probably the best.

   from Gramophone Feb 1972

BEETHOVEN. Piano Sonatas: No. 24 in F sharp major, Op.78; No.29 in B flat major, Op. 106, "Hammerklavier".
Alfred Brendel. Philips 6500 139 (L2.35).

The immediate and over-riding advantage of this new Hammerklavier and Op.78 is the tone quality; the sound is round and warm and full of bloom in climaxes which previously were clangy. But anyone who put a lot of money into Brendel's first Beethoven cycle, not so long ago reissued on Turnabout, need not despair. In the eight (or so) intervening years, this artist's fundamental conception of the two works has not changed. The differences that I've so far been able to detect do not add up to major revaluations. If pressed to summarize them (very dangerous) I'd say that they smooth one or two rough edges. Mature wisdom, you might say, instead of immediate inflammability.
In the Hammerklavier I expected the Adagio to be substantially slower than before (like the finale in the new Op. 111). But here Mr Brendel offers something infinitely calmer and more spiritual without any drastic departure from his familiar (on the concert platform too) tempo for this movement—never as slow as some artists. This is a profoundly moving performance, with every detail perfectly related to the chosen speed. The fugal finale, on the other hand, is a bit faster than before, and a good deal more suave and fluent-sounding in flow. There is another difference in the trio of the Scherzo, here less excitable in dynamics—and without so urgently forceful a return to the recapitulated scherzo section. In sum, a very fine, thoughtful, reading from a searching keyboard 'philosopher'.
More than any other piano music I know, this sonata to me evokes a composer who had tapped some elemental source of power, driving him on from first note to last in a single, creative flood : and you have only to play the first few bars to realize which of these two artists is the more eruptively dramatic. But maybe other people have other views about Beethoven's state of mind in 1818 . . .
Needless to say Serkin plays with very deep feeling. But with his considerably faster tempo than Ashkenazy's or Brendel's, he never, to my mind, gets as far above the clouds into the purity of outer space as Ashkenazy or Brendel—and particularly Brendel, whose insight into this movement impresses me more every time I hear it ...  ~J.0. C.

               from Gramophone April 1982

BEETHOVEN. Piano Sonatas—No. 26 in E flat major, op. 81 a, "Les adieux'; No. 29 in B flat major, op. 106, "Hammerklavier".
Alfred Brendel lpnol. Philips ® 6514 110: 7337 110. Item marked from 6768 004 (11/78).
t6500 139 (2/72).

I find comparable pleasure, too, in having a chance to listen in detail to Brendel's remarkable reading of the Hammerklat'ier Sonata which is also pertinently re-coupled with a performance of Les adieux which is wonderfully robust and penetrating, a revealingly apt preface to the Hammerkiavier itself. The absorbed use of tone colour, evident in slow movements and at the very end of movements on these records, informs the first movement of this performance of the Hammerkla pier. The tempo, though flexible, is a slowish one with very intense shaping of transitional figurations. Brendel seems especially concerned with structural and harmonic issues as a way towards the music's extraordinary sense of light and dark. Throughout the performance slow pulses, far-seeing but flexibly ordered, are deployed in a way familiar from some of Furtwangler's interpretations. The una corda playing in the great slow movement has a special visionary raptness, yet Brendel also has a keen sense of the music's varying stresses, its living drama. He brings Out with great perspicuity Beethoven's ability to marry an over-arching argument with a sub-text made up of absorbed acts of improvisation. The playing of the move ment's recapitulation seems to me especially fine, the high tessitura writing inflected with a special intensity, pain and detachment from pain, grief and joy, ambiguously commingled.
The recording of Les adieux is marginally fuller and more forward, but both admirably reproduce performances of outstanding interest.   ~R.O.

[Todd]

Todd, I also did not know Arrau did a complete sonata cycle later for Phillips in addition to the 60's set.

A reviewer at Amazon states that only 27/2 and 106 were not rerecorded, though I can't verify that.  The astronomical price has kept me from buying the set.  If/when it is available at a reasonable price, I will buy it.

[Scion7]

Yes, I have one record from his Philips set:

           click image


Back in the day, this was on Philips' discount label - which meant you only paid $9 instead of $15!!!
Imports were murder on the ol' wallet, but what could one do?  For the most part, DG and Philips sorta ruled on LP.
From 1967 and 1964.


       from Gramophone  April 1967

BEETHOVEN. PIANO SONATAS. No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31 No. 2.
Claudio Arrau (piano). Philips © AL3603 Q SAL3603 (12 in., 32s. 3d. plus 5s. 9d. PT).


Arrau's performance of the D minor is on a higher level altogether, despite an unusually relaxed tempo in the finale in which something of the movement's fierce concentration is lost.  All the dramatic contrasts are strongly brought out and the two semiquaver phrasing is impeccable. The Largo is unspoiled by mannerisms—no mistaking the soundless tramp of a mazsive 3/4 rhythm here! This is the kind of playing which one expects from an elder statesman of the keyboard.
The recording is adequate though a little close as to balance. Occasional miscalculations in pedalling are shown up: but Arrau can take this in his stride.   ~J.B.

           from Gramophone  Dec 1965

BEETHOVEN. Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53, "Waldstein". Claudio Arrau (piano). Philips
AL3517: Q SAL3517 (12 in., 32s. 3d. plus 5s. 3d. P.T.).

The records of Beethoven sonatas Claudio Arrau made for Columbia are now all deleted, which is a pity since there were some fine ones. But he is now busy recording a lot of Beethoven for Philips. ... It has been said often enough that Arrau's studio recordings rarely capture the brilliance and compelling quality of his performances in the concert hall; and you can't get away from it, they don't. But even though this disc, like so many of the others, doesn't show him at his best, it does have sterling qualities of intelligence and sound musical purpose and there's much to enjoy. I liked it a good deal better than his recording of the Hammer/clacier sonata which I wrote about last March. His readings of the Pathétique and the Waldstein are notable primarily for basing themselves so firmly on exactly what Beethoven wrote: down to the last dynamic marking there's scarcely a thing that's missed. The gains from such strictness are many and the results especially interesting where grace notes—here played on the beat—and Beethoven's pedalling effects are concerned. The grace notes in the first movement of the Waldrtein, (i.e. the ones in bars 4 and 8 of the first subject) are not crushed—as they usually are—on to the main note they precede. Beethoven's notation of them suggests that indeed they shouldn't be: if he had wantedaecacciature he could have indicated this. Whether the little notes should in fact come exactly on the beat, as opposed to a fraction before it, is debatable. But here, with Arrau playing them on the beat, as tiny appoggiature, they certainly take on more character and an added harmonic significance—an interesting and, I think, a convincing way of treating them. Convincing too is Arrau's interpretation of Beethoven's pedalling markings in the Wald.utein's finale. He makes them contribute to the grandness of the sonority without ever letting them cloud the changes of harmony too much, and that's a difficult thing to calculate and bring off on the modern grand piano.
Calculation, yes: the pity is that there's quite so much of it on the record. In passages of slow music especially one frequently finds oneself standing back and admiring but at the same time quite uninvolved and unmoved. And that brings me back to the lack of communication in Arrau's studio recordings that I mentioned earlier. Admirable though these performances are in many ways, neither quite gets off the ground and neither has quite enough communicative spark to convey and generate in the listener a vivid musical experience.    ~S.P.

[George]

No indications that it is.  It's part of the budget Collector's series, so I'd bet it's not.

Sony and EMI have been remastering their budget boxes. I hope Decca doesn't do the same with their budget boxes.