Once in a very blue moon Cycling through Beethoven’s sonatas

CYCLING THROUGH BEETHOVEN’S SONATAS

There are 100-year comets, fourleaf clovers, and sometimes even a World Series win by the Chicago Cubs — and then there’s a performance of Beethoven’s complete cycle of Sonatas for Violin and Piano. The capstone of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s 2019 season takes place Tuesday through Thursday, Aug. 13-15, when Ida Kavafian and Anne-Marie McDermott perform Beethoven’s complete sonatas for violin and piano at the Lensic Performing Arts Center.

The individual sonatas are frequently played, but performances of all 10 — which were composed between 1797 and 1812 — as a cycle are rare. (The most recent traversal of the sonatas in America seems to have been in La Jolla, California, in 2017.) “This is an incredible opportunity for Santa Fe audiences,” observed the festival’s artistic director, Marc Neikrug. “Pinchas Zukerman and I played these sonatas all over the world for 35 years, and we never did more than seven or eight full cycles during that whole time.

“You feel exhilarated and exhausted at the end of playing them all, but you also have this incredible feeling of community — that you and the audience have given each other a great gift by going through this transformative experience together over such a short time. It’s really the Ring Cycle of chamber music. Doing them in chronological order means the audience is traveling with Beethoven through one of his most important periods. He was breaking through the stylistic formalities of the time, moving from classicism to romanticism.”

Kavafian and McDermott bring exceptional performance credentials to the festival’s sonatas cycle. McDermott has performed as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the orchestras of Atlanta, Dallas, St. Louis, and Seattle. Her recordings include the complete Prokofiev piano sonatas and all of Gershwin’s music for piano and orchestra. Kavafian was a longtime member of the Beaux Arts Trio and the pioneering TASHI ensemble. Her recordings include collaborations with the Guarneri Quartet; she has also toured and recorded with Chick Corea and Wynton Marsalis.

Both women serve as artistic leaders of important chamber music groups. Kavafian was the founding

artistic director of Colorado’s Bravo! Vail Music Festival and New Mexico’s Music From Angel Fire, now in its 36th season. McDermott has been Bravo! Vail’s artistic director since 2011; she’s also the artistic director for Florida’s Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival and curator for chamber music for the Mainly Mozart Festival in San Diego.

TUESDAY, AUG. 13

Beethoven wrote the first three sonatas when he was 27. They are the work of a confident young composer who has mastered the prevailing style and is starting to deepen its expressive possibilities. The first, in D major, features many fast key changes and sudden dynamic contrasts. During the third movement, the music comically jumps into a completely unexpected key and then out again, as if the composer made a composition mistake and forgot to go back and correct it. Beethoven’s sense of humor also comes to the fore in the second sonata, which seems to end with a big final cadence by the violin, only to have the piano continue for another two measures. The third sonata, in E-flat major, is especially notable for its virtuoso piano part and the deeply emotional middle movement.

WEDNESDAY, AUG.14

Sonatas four through seven see Beethoven expanding the scope by starting to add a fourth, contrasting movement. They’re scherzos, which are relatively short and are in a triple meter, so they have the feeling of a waltz. Scherzo is the Italian word for “joke,” and they can have a comic aspect — as in the fifth sonata, in which the violin sounds like it can’t keep up with the piano. Beethoven also widens his emotional palette by choosing minor keys for two of these pieces. The seventh sonata is especially interesting. It’s in C minor, which is Beethoven’s choice to convey intense drama, as in the Funeral March from his Eroica symphony, which he was starting to sketch out at the time, and in the fifth symphony. The seventh sonata also contains several structural innovations that prefigure his later compositions.

THURSDAY, AUG. 15

The final program’s most remarkable work is the ninth sonata, the Kreutzer Sonata, because it’s so unlike all the others. It’s much longer — with an incredibly showy and difficult violin part — and much more dramatic. In reality, it sounds like a violin concerto with the orchestra replaced by a piano. It starts with a slow introduction, followed by an agitated presto movement. The second movement is more relaxed; the third returns to top speed with a tarantella, a fiery Italian folk dance. The

program-opening eighth sonata, in G major, shows Beethoven at his sunniest and most charming, reflecting the time he spent in a forest outside Vienna during its composition. A nearly 10-year gap separates the tenth and final sonata from the ninth. Beethoven wrote it shortly after finishing his seventh and eighth symphonies, so here his mature style, with its probing intensity, is fully in evidence. Because it was written for Pierre Rode’s relatively restrained playing style, the tenth sonata has fewer violin pyrotechnics than most of the others.