Instrumental
Michael Church delights in Igor Levit’s illuminating take on the master’s best
Beethoven
Complete Piano Sonatas
Igor Levit (piano)
Sony 19075843182 605 mins (9 discs)
We’ve heard Igor Levit’s complete Beethoven live – and occasionally bumpy – at the Wigmore Hall, but to encounter it in distilled form is a bracingly illuminating experience. You won’t find here any startling new interpretations of the ‘Pathetique’, ‘Moonlight’, or ‘Les adieux’ sonatas, though Levit’s readings of those works are authoritative.
What you will get is a new sense of the sheer physicality of the music. In a liner-note interview Levit talks about how congenial he finds Beethoven’s ‘physically centred’ writing… each hand operates as a relatively self-contained unit, bringing the different voices together within a stable position and meaningfully weighting each line’. He takes as his text the Sonata in A Op. 2 No. 2, which has been his touchstone since his teens, and which has taught him, he says, a vocabulary he’s been able to apply to other works. This is sometimes patronised as a youthful effusion, but as Levit renders its smouldering passion, coiled energy and rockhewn contrasts, it acquires volcanic force.
In Levit’s view, the Waldstein is the hinge on which not only Beethoven’s oeuvre but the whole world of piano music turns – a revolutionary statement which changed everything, with its opening demanding ‘a completely reckless tempo, as if flashes of lightning are flying round your ears’. But what’s fascinating about Levit’s whole cycle is the crazy tempos at which he takes the Allegros and Prestos, with the finale of even the first sonata racing flawlessly at jet-propelled speed. Indeed, his treatment of the early works is the most interesting aspect of the cycle: the comedy and wit of Op. 2 No. 3 and Op. 10 No. 2, the mercurial playfulness of Op. 31 No. 1. Only at a very few points – notably the Allegro of Op. 78 – does Levit take unwarranted liberties with the text; there are times, as in the perpetuum mobile of Op. 54, when he goes too fast for the contours of the music to be savoured, but these defects are forgivable in the cycle’s headlong rush.
Where savagery is required, Levit provides it in spades: the first movement of the Hammerklavier is a glittering creation purveying a properly visceral excitement. Levit apparently also loves what he calls the ‘islands’ where no footholds of tempo or tonality are possible, and he finds one of those in the short slow movement of Op. 101. Indeed, the opening movement of
Op. 109, and the whole of Op. 110, which in his hands comes in gracefully muted shades of grey, both feel like meditations. Not a definitive cycle, then, but with this music no cycle could ever be that; it’s enough that this one should delight, provoke and intrigue in equal measure. PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
Hear extracts from this recording and the rest of this month’s choices on the BBC Music Magazine website at www.classical-music.com
Levit’s treatment of the early works is the most interesting aspect of the cycle
Piano Sonatas Nos 19, 47, 50, 54, 58 and 59
Leon Mccawley (piano)
Somm Recordings SOMMCD 0602 77.02 mins
‘More Haydn from this pianist would be welcome,’ concluded the review in these pages of Leon Mccawley’s first Haydn collection in February 2017. And here we have it: a wellbalanced selection of six sonatas ranging from the early No. 19 in E minor, with its already intensely charged Siciliano, by way of the stark No. 47 in B minor, redolent of Haydn’s ‘storm and stress’ middle period, to the comprehensive maturity of his great late No. 59 in E flat major, with its ornately expressive central Adagio. All this recorded with appropriate crispness and cantabile in Turner Sims hall.
The sparkle of Mccawley’s touch is instantly apparent in the frolicsome Allegro of Sonata No. 50 in D major which opens the disc, as is his evenness of fingering in the passagework of its Presto finale, while the darkly baroque Largo Haydn so unexpectedly places between them exemplifies this pianist’s ability to sustain a slow tempo without undue resort to pedal. Most impressive throughout the disc is Mccawley’s command of subtle nuance and rubato without ever sounding self-conscious or mannered. The impression, so artfully mediated, is that the music is being allowed to speak for its witty, turbulent, elegant or serene self. We are beginning to be spoiled for choice amidst the plethora of recent Haydn sonata recordings, but this collection should stand high on any list. Bayan Northcott PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★