SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Beethoven: Llŷr Williams (piano), Reardon Smith Theatre, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 12.12.2010 (GPu)

Beethoven, Piano Sonata in E, Opus 109
Beethoven, Piano Sonata in A Flat, Opus 110
Beethoven, Piano Sonata in C Minor, Opus 111

This was an engrossing, almost wholly satisfying recital, a fascinating and rewarding traversal of notoriously challenging music, played with intensity and intellectual clarity. A few years ago the playing of Llŷr Williams was sometimes a little stiff and unyielding but now, in his mid-thirties, his work has great authenticity and certainty of purpose allied to a flexible responsiveness that generally makes for compelling performances.

The last three of Beethoven’s piano sonatas have often been played together in recital or recorded as a set. It is not hard to see why. The similarities and differences that they share invite analysis and reflection; they were written in quick succession (especially considering the enormous personal difficulties and the other compositional commitments Beethoven had in this last decade of his life) and there is a kind of resulting singleness of trajectory very discernable when they are heard together. They all have about them an air of ‘lastness’. Whether or not Beethoven knew that they were to be his last works in a genre which he had done so much to take beyond the exemplars provided by Haydn and Mozart is not really the point; what matters and what is certain is that they are the work of a composer fully conscious of all that he had already achieved in the form, that they were written out of a sensibility in part formed by that preceding achievement and conditioned by that weight of personal musical history. In Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus the narrator reports that the fictional Wendell Kretschmar said of the last sonata, the two-movement Opus 111 that “the sonata had come in the second, enormous movement, to an end, an end without any return”. And when he said ‘the sonata,’ he meant not only this one in C minor, but the sonata in general, as a species, as traditional art-form; it itself was here at an end, brought to its end, it had fulfilled its destiny, reached its goal, beyond which there was no going, it cancelled and resolved itself, it took leave – the gesture of farewell of the D G G motif, consoled by the C sharp, was a leave-taking in this sense too, great as the whole piece itself, the farewell of the sonata form”. One needn’t go quite as far as the hyperbolic Kretschmar while still feeling the sense, very strongly, that these three sonatas constitute an enormous act of closure, a summation of all that had gone before in the tradition of the piano sonata and a profound challenge to anyone and anything that might try to come afterwards.

In the opening of Opus 109 Beethoven unmistakeably remembers the origins of the piano sonata tradition, with reminiscences of Haydn; its lightness and grace might also have been heard (perhaps by Beethoven himself?) as a startling contrast with Opus 106 (the Hammerklavier) its predecessor in the sequence of Beethoven’s sonatas. One of my few slight reservations about Williams’s performance of these three astonishing sonatas was a feeling that he didn’t quite do justice to the (seemingly) artless grace of the opening vivace of the first movement or discover an underlying coherence in the transition to the adagio expressivo that follows, and the ensuing alternation of tempi and motif. The brief prestissimo second movement, however, which balanced energy and anxiety in a thoroughly convincing and engaging fashion carried absolute conviction. In the theme and six variations which constitute this unconventional sonata’s final movement, Williams’s playing had a structural clarity that established patterns of continuity and difference with glorious certainty. I have felt before now that Williams has often been at his very considerable best in sets of variations and this was sense was certainly confirmed here (and so was a sense of excited expectation at the thought of the coming second movement of Opus 111).

The first movement of Opus 110 displays even more obvious affinities with Viennese classicism than those to be heard at the opening of Opus 109. The sense of scale in Williams’s playing was perfectly judged in the first movement, full of spiritual possibility, quite without excessive grandeur and yet making it clear that this was music which, for all its roots in Haydn (there are borrowings from Haydn’s Symphony No.88), was leading us into territories that that great master would not have thought to enter. The brief middle movement was full of boisterous energy which, in its early stages at any rate, had a sense of rough fun, before one began to feel that this was energy was an almost desperate attempt to escape the deeper waters more than hinted at by music’s quieter moments. The remarkable final movement got the kind of performance it deserves – its opening played with a sense of space which brought poignancy to the adagio’s aria-like patterns, a poignancy at times becoming almost morbid, but never quite doing so. The fugal material was presented with inviting fluency, in which lines were etched with sharp clarity; the formally unexpected return of the adagio theme was beautifully integrated and the extraordinary ten repeated chords which herald the closing phase of the movement had about them an irresistible authority, an accumulating and growing power which made of them a summons which no audience could have resisted, before the movement built towards a radiant affirmation. Williams had delineated the sonata’s complex emotional transitions with an absorbed intensity which always allowed the listener in.

The two movements of Opus 111 were written, it seems, very rapidly. Here Beethoven’s subversion of the orthodoxies of the genre is absolute. Its two movements (and could even Beethoven really have successfully realised an appropriate third?) are a musical diptych built on simple, but profound antitheses. The first relentlessly fast; the second slow and at moments seemingly without movement; the first in C minor the second in C major. Though such metaphorical verbalisations are, of course, always inadequate it is hard to resist the temptation to think, as one listens, in terms of other perennial antithetical patterns: struggle and serenity; fury and tranquillity; storm and calm; light and dark; earthly and spiritual; even war and peace. Listening to Llŷr Williams’s superb performance of this magnificent sonata, I found myself thinking in terms of confinement and release, imprisonment and liberty. In the first movement the thunderous bass notes, the dark and heavily emphasised chords, the densely contrapuntal writing were all articulated with a full weight of sound and emotion, a sense both of the sombreness of life and the confinements of bewilderment, pain and uncertainty; one heard in the music a profundity both intellectual and, as it were, spatial, a sense of being locked away from light and possibility, only relieved in the closing bars in a dying away into silence which Williams held poised as a hint, rather than an assurance of release. The serenity with which the second movement retained its power to startle, after what had preceded it – even if one ‘knew’ it was coming, a tribute to the absorption Williams created in the hearer’s mind. The serenity, and the implicit nobility were mixed with a certain hesitancy, like survivors of turmoil, or released prisoners, finding themselves and the world before them once again. Though whether that world is our own or another is impossible to say. Certainly there are moments of unearthly beauty in the four variations at the heart of the movement (and one’s high expectations of how good Williams might be in this movement were fully realised). The fourth variation in particular, was remarkable. Williams did something approaching justice (perhaps no one performance can ever do this music full justice, it is as ‘unperformable’ as Charles Lamb thought King Lear which, of course, makes it all the more necessary that it should be performed) to the movement’s transcendental sublimity, to the astonishing way in which its final bars seem to evaporate rather than end.

Llŷr Williams doesn’t have the manner or the personality that might lend themselves easily to the publicity machine; it seems unlikely that he will ever quite become a ‘star’ in the way that term gets used nowadays about musicians. But, as a musician pure and simple, he compares well with many of those who have bigger ‘names’ than he does. Hopefully all who heard this recital went away with Beethoven at the front of their minds; that, after all, is how it should be. But later reflection would also surely have left them in no doubt as to the considerable merit, the penetrating intelligence and authority, of the pianist they had heard.

Glyn Pursglove