A fearless ambassador to an untamed spirit: Murray Perahia plays Beethoven
DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON
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discourse, albeit at greater length and on a higher plane, in Perahia’s free-flowing yet lofty account of the great soliloquy that stands at the heart of the Hammerklavier.
Kempff was one of the few pianists of his generation who avoided ponderousness in the Moonlight’s middle movement. Perahia, too, catches well the dance’s melancholy grace and epigrammatic charm; and though his account of the Trio is properly robust, the almost hallucinatory quality Beethoven brings to the drone bass in the Trio’s concluding bars is not lost on Perahia. Thus, when the dance returns, it too appears to have taken on something of the mood of barely suppressed pain that is the sonata’s abiding characteristic.
It’s been said that the work’s undeniably angry finale tries too hard, is too repetitive. There’s no sense of that in Perahia’s reading, which has exactly the right degree of implacability, for all that he’s happy to play Beethoven’s game of false dawns with a gracious approach to the recapitulation and a decorous descent from the coda’s emblazoning high trill to the pit below. The ferocity with which the two last chords are delivered suggests, however, that the composer’s travails are not yet over.
A late chapter in this same story arrived with the composition of the Hammerklavier in 1818, by which time Beethoven had become, in JWN Sullivan’s words, ‘the great solitary’, ‘a man of infinite courage, infinite suffering’. Much ink has been spilled on how rapidly the first movement should travel. ‘Uncommonly quick and fiery’ was Czerny’s judgement, an approach that echoes the spirit, if not the letter, of Beethoven’s hairraising metronome mark. Artur Schnabel attempted that in his legendary HMV recording (11/36) made in exile in London in 1935, by which time the once ‘flawless’ playing (Claudio Arrau’s testimony) was no longer entirely flawless. For all his own tribulations in recent years, Perahia’s playing pretty well is. His approach to the first movement is never reckless yet it’s essentially ‘quick and fiery’, the fearless ambassador to a still untamed spirit.
Perahia is artist enough to know that great art is never, of itself, ugly. It may be Beethoven’s instinct to push every component of the dauntingly complex contrapuntal finale to its logical conclusion (and beyond) but Perahia, though honouring the intent, declines to turn the music into a rout. In matters of musical diction, lucidity matters.
Not long before the sonata’s end, Beethoven introduces a three-part fugato, a lyric inspiration of rare beauty, limpid in D. In the context of this carefully gauged programme, we might be tempted to recall the similarly precarious beauties of the C sharp minor Sonata’s opening movement – except that, for some inexplicable reason, the producers have placed the sonata after the Hammerklavier. That lapse notwithstanding, this is a disc, naturally and vividly recorded, of rare distinction and pedigree. Richard Osborne March 2018
Beethoven Missa solemnis Charlotte Margiono sop Catherine Robbin mez William Kendall ten Alastair Miles bass Monteverdi Choir; English Baroque Soloists / John Eliot Gardiner Archiv Produktion F 429 779-2AH (72’ • DDD)
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Gramophone Award 1991 (Recording of the Year & Choral)
We know that the Missa solemnis has moments of the utmost and loveliest serenity, others when a spirit of confidence reigns, when grandeur is proclaimed with harmonic simplicity, and assurance affirmed with measured tread. Yet it’s the great whirls of sound, the divine scattering and striving, the straining of the soul to dance in freedom from all laws of time and formal conventions that ultimately characterize the work in our minds. Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a Heaven for? Exactly: Beethoven seems to be reaching beyond human grasp, and one of Heaven’s good works must surely be to give the Missa solemnis its ideal performance, liberated from all constraints of matter. Well, it now appears we do not need to wait that long. With his expert choir of 36 and his orchestra of 60 (with original instruments), Gardiner, like Terje Kvam on Nimbus before him, sheds some of the weight of numbers usually employed; he also has a team of soloists without weaknesses, and, it must be added, his own genius for making all things new. Comparison between the two recordings hardly needs to go beyond the first entry of the choir, where Gardiner’s singers bring meaning and urgency to their cries of Kyrie which with Kvam’s Oslo Cathedral Choir are scarcely more than formal statements.
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