When the pianist’s obsession becomes audience oppression
Jonathan Biss Wigmore Hall, London W1 ★★★★★
There are still 10 days to go before the 250th anniversary year of Beethoven’s birth begins, but the musical world can’t wait. Pianists, string quartets and orchestras have already launched their complete Beethoven series and the flood of Beethoven recordings has begun.
Young American pianist Jonathan Biss is well ahead of the game, having launched his complete sonata cycle at the Wigmore Hall in September. That, plus his ongoing complete recording, his 2001 book on Beethoven and online learning course, reveals a pianist obsessed with the composer, and the playing has an undeniable high-seriousness. At Thursday night’s concert, he seemed determined to wring the maximum intensity from every single moment.
Admittedly the four sonatas he chose were high-intensity fare. They included three of Beethoven’s most stormy sonatas, the Appassionata, the so-called Tempest sonata, and the furious early C minor sonata Op 10. But the early E flat major sonata he began with is very different. It’s a rollicking piece of almost gleeful high spirits – at least that’s normally how it sounds, but at Biss’s crazily fast tempo it lost all its good humour. The music felt compressed, unable to breathe, as Biss scrambled to get round the notes.
Fortunately, things improved after that disappointing opening. This concert had several of those hugely spacious, very slow movements that reveal Beethoven’s radical transformation of piano music just as vividly as his blood-and-thunder moments.
Biss subtly brought out the way their starry-night grandeur is leavened by a dance-floor elegance. And he certainly took his courage in both hands, realising that to bring Beethoven’s originality to life you must be willing to take risks. The contrast between panic-stricken motion and glacial stillness in the Tempest was tellingly extreme, and the ending of Appassionata was a wild rush to oblivion.
Yet the cheer that greeted that ending was somewhat muted, and overall the evening felt somewhat disappointing, despite its undeniable high points. The problem was that Biss’s determination to project these great works on to a transcendent plane made him too tense and serious at every moment, so he lost the essential flexibility that a performer needs to take possession of a piece.
One became aware of details being carefully moulded, rather than Beethoven’s grand design. Biss is a serious and talented artist, but at the moment one feels he is looking up at these works from below. He needs to look them in the eye.
Jonathan Biss: Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas Vol 9 is out now
Biss seemed determined to wring the maximum intensity from every single moment