Download free music MP3s on genuine quality, the world’s largest online music catalogue, powered by your scrobbles. Free listening, videos, photos, The world’s largest online music catalogue, powered by your scrobbles. Free listening, videos, photos, stats, charts, biographies and concerts. stats, charts, biographies and concerts.
Friday, April 5, 2024
The end of the line
A BEETHOVEN ODYSSEY VOLUME 9 James Brawn MSR Classics MS 1473 So here we are at the grand finale of Brawn's exposition of the 32 Beethoven sonatas, leaving two of the most demanding scores till this climactic point. It's a late period pa…
So here we are at the grand finale of Brawn's exposition of the 32 Beethoven sonatas, leaving two of the most demanding scores till this climactic point. It's a late period pairing: No. 28 in A Major (1816), and No. 29 in B flat Major (1818). Both make great demands on executants, the latter Hammerklavier a pianistic high-water mark of concentrated expression and formal skill. While the appearance of this particular A Major work on a recital program is not common, you can wait from one decade to the next to hear a pianist of stature presenting the big B flat score, most musicians happy to follow the usual round of Pathetique (No. 8), Moonlight (No 14), Waldstein (No. 21), and Appassionata (No. 23).
I believe that the last time I heard the Hammerklavier attempted was by Michael Kieran Harvey who participated in one of Stephen McIntyre's Piano Landmarks days at the then Congregational Church (now St. Michael's Uniting) in Melbourne's Collins St. eastern heights. From memory, the first two movements passed along successfully, but then matters became directionless in the lengthy Adagio sostenuto; at all events, Harvey left the platform with the work incomplete. Mind you, he'd done this before when tackling Elliott Carter's Piano Sonata for the Astra people; he lost his way but returned to finish the monster off. As did Carl Vine with the same work some years later, I seem to recall.
Since that truncated Hammerklavier, I don't think the work has come my way in live performance; perhaps once. But you can see why, right from the first full bar with its right-hand minor 9th stretch - impossible for those of us with Dupuytren's contracture without an arpeggiation. And there's worse to follow in bar 3 with a full Major 9th. The left hand isn't left unscathed; see bars 193-4. This first movement Allegro is necessarily peppered with these first theme statements in full (or even half) cry, before we even consider the intervening fluctuations in attack and digital negotiation across the pages.
As you'd expect, Brawn has no such problems in handling these stretches. As usual, he takes time to give breathing space to phrase changes as the exposition's setting-out moves past and observes his own dynamic markings in the first outline and again in its repetition; the former straight after the change to G Major across the sequences in bars 47-62, while the latter is observable in the restrained sforzandi (in my Henle edition)) of bars 28-30 (actually, I think they're ignored). Later, this pianist takes considerable pains to give a focus to the movement's eccentric development with its taut fugato stretch and focus on cells (e.g. bars 189 to 200), even if the material come across as intractably dogged - which in other readings can result in plenty of hammering.
As shown throughout this odyssey, Brawn has a rare sensitivity to Beethoven's apparent baldness of statement, pitching his responsiveness to a simple acceptance of the score and handling the work as a product of its time; which is preferable to turning a rhetorical movement such as this one into a hurtling monument to virtuosity and sheer heft. The following scherzo is handled with dispatch, its central motive in occasional danger of blurring the central repeated note/interval/chord that gives the movement its rhythmic interest and urgency. Even the central trio, with its going-nowhere arpeggio statements, passes in a blur before the oddities arrive with a disorienting presto, cadenza, and brief temperamental flurry in bar 113.
Even the conclusion to these pages with their double octave insistence on near stasis serves to unnerve the listener because, although Brawn conveys lightness and impetuosity in combination, you may be left uncertain as to the intention of the entire movement. Is it meant to be a throwaway bit of badinage with irritated outbursts, or should we prospect for deeper veins of impatience and dissatisfaction? Whatever your finding, Brawn inclines to the mercurial, which comes as a welcome intermission before the sonata's great challenge. This Adagio is 187 bars long and often strikes me as interminable because, while its shape is apprehensible (eventually), the process of reaching a resolution is hyper-extended. Not that this reading is as wearisome as you can find in other recordings; it's just that Brawn is ultra-sensitive to Beethoven's tonality fluctuations and also inserts pauses that may point up phrase shapes but also substitute emotional sympathy for momentum.
Where you can see why the executant pauses before the move to G Major at bar 14, I can't see why there is a hesitation before the totally anticipatable A Major opening to bar 39. Or the arrival at D Major in bar 53 where a comma breaks up an already inevitable sentence. A little further on, the written note values are treated pretty cavalierly (e.g. bar 62), but the handling of that ornate batch of demi-semiquavers from bar 87 to bar 103 shows a high degree of empathetic responsiveness to some awkward writing. Just as well-placed realizations come at the two points where a main motive is shared between bass and treble (bars 45 to 52, again at bars 130 to 137, finally a pinch at bars 134-138).
Also, as at the work's opening, you can admire the even accomplishment of those frequent stretches (here, of various 10ths) that come across with remarkable facility; the last bars in particular indicative of the interpreter's mastery of technique and sustained atmosphere. Nevertheless, it's always a relief to leave these morose pages for the work's finale which - after some more eccentric fantasia-like interludes - eventually arrives with the Allegro risoluto/determined three-part fugue. There's no way any executant can make this sound orderly and a post-Baroque example of the form; it's neither. What marks Brawn's effort is its clarity.
In part this comes from a modest employment of the sustaining pedal, notable right from the opening entries where the aim is linear probity which verges on the percussive. In my book, that's fine and infinitely preferable to washes of fabric, no matter how imposing the output. What is significant is the way this player continues as he began with a welcome transparence in harmonic conflicts like those chromatic clashes (well, semitonal juxtaposition clashes) that begin with the change of key signature at bar 53). As well, you have to give credit to the deft treatment of Beethoven's increasingly manic trills that reach their apogee of frequency between bars 235 and 246 before the overwhelming bass one on B flat that lasts between bars 373 and 380.
As a capping stone to this solid sonata, these pages stand as an extraordinary achievement, informed by an unstoppable vehemence and drive which simmers even during the D Major episode across bars 250 to 278. Brawn is able to sustain your involvement through his vivid approach that gives proper value to each line in what can become some of the thickest piano writing produced by this composer. I won't say it's not a relief to get to the end - it always is - but Brawn carries you along with a clear mastery of form and a confident delivery that eschews flashiness and pomp for plain-speaking and (God help us) bonhomie.
As for the Op. 101, the interpretation on offer has an attractive honesty, its character well established across the initial Etwas lebhaft - only a bit over a hundred bars of generally peaceful melodic arches with some unforgettably graceful, syncopated chord punctuation. Brawn is handy in implementing the empfindung that Beethoven asks for, but he has a keen eye for finding a phrase's point - exactly where it should aspire and decline, reserving his heftiest dynamic until the climactic fulcrum at bar 86 before that lean digest of material in the last seven measures.
More formidable problems emerge in the ensuing march where the hand/finger shifts can prove ungainly. But you have to strain to fault the player's contained impetuosity, which is only slightly decreased in bar 37, a scrap that comes across as hard-won for no apparent reason. Later, the canonic interplay that constitutes the main part of this movement's trio flows with excellent precision, the lines lucid and carefully mirroring each other. Then Brawn lingers over the brief Langsam, stretching note-lengths liberally to make as much emotional hay as possible across this brevity.
Before he breaks into the sonata's longest segment, the Geschwinde finale with its generally happy fugue centring the movement, the player has the welcome task of referring us back to the work's opening phrases: one of the most felicitous of reminiscences in all Beethoven, a delight to encounter. The Allegro's enunciation comes across as slightly awkward in some passages with parallel thirds, sixths or fourths in one hand, but much of this conclusion is closely argued by Brawn, particularly in the more complex segments of the fugal development, e.g. bars 149 to 156 and bars 201 to 206. Moreover, the rest is negotiated with the attention to detail that is one of this pianist's most consistent characteristics, including a finely achieved account of the fugue's glowering pedal-point conclusion between bars 223 and 227.
These two sonatas provide a fine ending to Brawn's readings of all the Beethoven sonatas. To my ears, he has given us interpretations of sincerity and security, packed with felicities that argue for a direct confrontation with the composer's prodigious output. My generation grew up with compendiums by Kempff, Brendel, and Schnabel, encountering later complete sonatas sets from Barenboim, Pollini and Badura-Skoda. These days, pianists I've heard, like Fazil Say and Paul Lewis, have produced complete sets; as well, a plethora of performers I've not heard (or sometimes heard of) have put forward their versions. Fortunately, Brawn is a high achiever in this company: if not as intellectually challenging as some of these more senior names, then just as pianistically gifted and insightful as his contemporaries.
No comments:
Post a Comment