MiV Home
Phillip T Young Recital Hall
August 13, 2018
If there is one word which has been overused almost to the point of meaninglessness in recent years, that word is "iconic".
Yet, if there is one series of musical compositions that truly merit the description, it would surely be the remarkable collection of twelve compositions that form Beethoven's Opp.53 to 62, works which (among others) occupied him in the years 1804-1807.
Indeed it is worth listing them: Op.53, the "Waldstein" piano sonata; Op.54, the F major piano sonata; Op.55, the "Eroica" symphony; Op.56, the Triple Concerto; Op.57, the "Appassionata" piano sonata; Op.58, the fourth piano concerto; Op.59, the three "Razumovsky" string quartets; Op.60, the fourth symphony; Op.61, the violin concerto; and Op.62, the overture "Coriolan".
The list epitomises Beethoven's "middle" period and virtually every work contained therein is both a masterpiece and groundbreaking in its genre.
Minsoo Sohn included the two "name" sonatas from that list in his splendid VSMF recital on Monday, as well as one earlier sonata and one work which would have been in the list if it had been given an opus number.
It was that work, the Andante favori, WoO57 which opened the recital; this was originally the slow movement of the "Waldstein" sonata, but the composer was told by a friend that the sonata was too long. Beethoven, as one might expect, was not pleased at the criticism but eventually saw the justice in it, removed the andante and replaced it with a slow introduction to the sonata's finale. But he frequently played the newly-orphaned piece, which attained considerable popularity, hence the nickname — at least according to his pupil Carl Czerny.
Sohn took the music at a fairly slow pace, perhaps slower than "andante" might suggest, but his concentrated playing and beautiful tone colours made it work.
He followed it with the work from which it was "untimely ripp'd", the Op.53 sonata.
One of the many remarkable aspects of the work is its opening, with the melody gradually emerging from repeated chords and Sohn's playing underlined its originality. He adopted a slightly more relaxed tempo for the second subject, while the buildup of tension in the tightly-controlled development was most impressive and the return of the opening music, heralding the recapitulation, sounded even more inevitable than usual.
The adagio molto introduction to the finale was quite lovely, with an empyrean stillness at its centre, as if Sohn was not quite willing to let the music go. But he did, easing into a smoothly flowing finale, its basic tempo arguably a little deliberate and the control of the structure perhaps not quite as vice-like as in the opening movement. But the final coda was suitably and most enjoyably exuberant.
I can never hear the opening of the Op.26 sonata, the so-called "Funeral March", without the thought that if Schubert had never existed it would have been necessary to invent him and that Beethoven, in this movement, comes closer than anyone else. (Schubert was scarcely out of his infancy when this sonata was written, but there is surely every chance that he heard it in his native Vienna.)
This was Beethoven's twelfth piano sonata and he clearly felt confident enough to make it unique in several ways: none of the four movements is in sonata form, the sonata opens with a slow theme-and-variations movement, the scherzo comes second and the slow movement (the funeral march of the title) third, the reverse of his usual practice in four-movement sonatas. The third movement is also the only music from any of his piano sonatas to have been orchestrated by Beethoven; it was played at his own funeral.
I was particularly taken with the gentleness of the first variation in Sohn's hands, the ominous left hand in the third, minor-key variation (Sir Andras Schiff calls this variation a "pre-echo" of the third movement), the dancing rubato of the fourth variation and the hint of a Schubert impromptu that is the fifth.
The scherzo had a delicious lilt, although it was a little hard-driven on occasion. The funeral march was indeed taken at a tempo appropriate for a slow march, it was big, dramatic and intense.
Finally, the restrained exuberance of the finale, seeming to suggest that, despite the tragedy of the previous movement, life must nonetheless go on. And the delicate ending was entirely delectable.
While I would not go so far as the late Glenn Gould, whose "private Beethoven poll places this sonata [the "Appassionata"] somewhere between the King Stephen Overture and the Wellington's Victoria Symphony" (ouch!), I do have a certain sympathy for his puzzlement at its overwhelming popularity; out of all thirty-two sonatas, I am not even sure that it would make my own Top Ten.
Sohn closed his recital with a bold, dramatic account of Op.57. The opening movement was turbulent but not lacking in subtlety, the slow movement, although once again, arguably slower than "andante con moto" would seem to indicate, was cast in lovely tones and I particularly enjoyed the filigree decorations of the third variation.
The finale opened at a deliberate tempo, with cleanly delineated lines. The forceful playing was very exciting, but this did mean that, as at other climactic moments throughout the evening, Sohn's tone acquired a slightly harsh edge. I would not make too much of this and it is quite possible that the lingering after effects of a migraine headache which I had (apparently successfully) shaken off earlier in the day might have left me feeling somewhat over-sensitive; it certainly did not seem to bother anybody else.
In any case, I can only imagine that Beethoven himself probably would not have cared: we all know just how he treated pianos.
In sum a very fine evening's pianism indeed.
But the audience were clearly not going to be satisfied until they got an encore and Sohn returned to dazzle us with more luminous tone colours and wonderfully volatile rubato in Liszt's Petrarch Sonnet 104 (from Book II, Italie, of the Années de Pelerinage).
When he returns, I would love to hear an all-Liszt recital.
A worthy close to this year's Victoria Summer Music Festival.
MiV Home