Concert Artist appears
to be juggling Joyce Hatto’s editions
of Mozart, Schubert and Brahms at the
moment, with Liszt and Chopin not far
behind and I’ve had the good fortune
to listen to many of them. Her Brahms
series progresses steadily and we have
here Volume III, devoted to those relatively
youthful masterpieces, the F minor Sonata
and the Handel Variations. Her Sonata
is nobly conceived. She doesn’t indulge
the kind of personalised dynamics that,
say, Zimerman does so raptly and intensely
but her left hand staccato is crisp
and even. She takes a more deliberate
approach in the first movement than
Curzon’s occasionally frenzied drama;
if anything her sometimes understated,
but never unengaged, playing reminds
me more of Kempff in this repertoire
(but certainly not Arrau, whose discursive
approach to this literature is not one,
I suspect, that Hatto would countenance).
There is a cohesion of linearity to
the playing, of things making sense,
but the powerful technique is very much
in place as well and a couple of trivial
finger slips only attest to the immediacy
and intensity of the playing. There
are one-take artists and there are patchers
and Hatto, I feel sure, comes very much
into the former category.
She certainly takes
a more robust attitude to the slow movement
than the ultra-sensitive Zimerman, who
treats its opening measures as an exquisite
lullaby. She takes a differing view,
a young person’s view and she’s more
extrovert, full of tone colour and recreative
beauty and a kind of reserved delicacy,
albeit a passionate climax. As one might
expect she takes the Scherzo relatively
straight; Zimerman is full of hilarity
and hi-jinx here, even if his is an
excessively extravagant reading and
obliterates left and right hand articulation.
Hatto’s Scherzo might work better if
accented more sharply and taken up to
tempo. Curzon is unmatched here for
incision and a sense of drama. A Brahms
disciple such as Etelka Freund (who
played to the composer when she was
seventeen and who recorded the Sonata
in the 1950s) takes the Scherzo at a
much more driving tempo; a better one
I’m convinced. It works better as an
internal contrastive mechanism at the
faster tempo. Etelka Freund is perhaps
the most stylistically interesting of
all – there’s a kinetic charge to her
playing that absorbs vulgarity, in its
best sense. It’s a feature of Brahms
playing that seems to have been lost
over the years. The Intermezzo’s three-note
figure is most aptly accented by Curzon
who gives it an intensely funereal tread
and depth of utterance, Hatto stressing
more than Zimerman. Compare Freund,
who was about the same age as Joyce
Hatto when she made her recording, and
we find that Freund is more tonally
vertical, and stresses the opposition
of left and right hands. I’d better
lay my cards on the table; few pianists
can match Curzon’s finale for all embracing
grandeur, power, nuance and forthright
humour; above all for the binding of
rhetoric so that his finale is a triumphant
conclusion. Others tend to be mere summation.
But I do find something extremely wonderful
about the grace and evenness of Hatto’s
beautiful playing of the cantabile melody
at its heart – such perfect evenness
at a relatively fast tempo leaves more
gestural and sentimental exponents sounding
decidedly lumpen.
The Variations and
Fugue on a Theme by Handel are certainly
no makeweight but they echo the virtues
of the Sonata performance and can be
warmly recommended as a performance.
The Aria is phrased with naturalness;
Variation 4 is emphatic, much more so
than, say, Vásáry and
she takes the espressivo Fifth very
seriously, playing up contrasts. Etelka
Freund in her 1950s sequence of Brahms
discs was full of flair here and lashings
of rubato and nevertheless a sure sense
of direction. No. 7 is an emphatic fanfare,
maybe too much so here, but No. 11 has
some subtle playing and fine rhythmic
control.
So all in all this
is another splendid contribution to
the literature from Joyce Hatto. The
acoustic however, though recorded in
the usual Concert Artists Studios in
Cambridge, sounds rather more swimmy
and echo-y than usual from that venue.
Jonathan Woolf
Joyce Hatto (piano) 
