By 1937 Schnabel had completed his cycle
of the Beethoven sonatas – the first
ever – and set out on a selection of
the other works. Since he had begun
the sonata cycle with the last sonatas
this means that the sublime culmination
is in the poorest sound, while most
of what we have here, as presented by
Mark Obert-Thorn, sounds really very
good indeed for its date. It struck
me that, a slight surface hiss apart,
if one April Fool’s Day you tried kidding
your friends that it’s a new recording
of a fortepiano, you might almost get
away with it.
I can’t imagine that
even such a comprehensive Beethovenian
played the early Rondo here very often,
and Schnabel’s elegance and charm cannot
really persuade us that Beethoven was
already a great composer at the age
of twelve. While in the following Minuet
Beethoven seems to want to pretend that
he still wasn’t a great composer in
1805 (when he already had the "Eroica"
symphony behind him) and Schnabel can’t
do very much about that either.
The Bagatelles are
another matter and here Schnabel’s calm
poise is quite wonderful. He does, however,
deliberately keep the range small, whereas
the last recording of these pieces that
came my way, by the highly talented
Zeynep Ucbasaran review,
gave the sudden fortes more sting, as
though Beethoven were straining at the
leash.
In the F major variations
I noted how well Schnabel’s technique
was behaving in music he can’t have
played all that often. Indeed, perhaps
for this reason he is playing safe,
for I detected an uncharacteristic measure
of caution at times, with variation
2, for example, more an Allegretto than
an Allegro ma non troppo and variation
6 more an Andante than an Allegretto.
Still, he finds by these means a Schubertian
lyricism in the work.
Of all the pieces here,
I imagine that the "Eroica"
variations was the one that he played
in recital with a regularity similar
to that of the sonatas. This is a true
Schnabel performance, heroic, Promethean,
his fingers tumbling over right notes
and wrong but intrepidly communicative.
We get no-holds-barred humour in the
zany variation 9 and he penetrates deeply
into the mysterious variation 15, where
Beethoven seems already to be opening
the door on the strange, lonely world
of his late works. His noble intoning
of the Prometheus theme at the end is
more than a match for what most conductors
manage in the roughly similar music
in the "Eroica" symphony,
in spite of the panoply of horns the
orchestra can offer.
Schnabel doesn’t really
convince me that the op. 77 fantasy
is not one of Beethoven’s more oddball
misses. As "Für Elise"
began it crossed my mind that maybe
I had never heard this ubiquitous thing
actually played professionally! His
gentle lilt at the beginning should
be heard by all young pianists who think
it has to be played fast and loud, though
his typically divine impetuousness in
some of the episodes is maybe for adults
only.
Highly recommended
then, and enthusiastically so
in the case of the "Eroica"
variations.
Christopher Howell
see also review
by Robert Hugill
Artur Schnabel (piano) 
