In the booklet notes for this, the final volume of András Schiff’s
complete cycle of Beethoven’s sonatas, the pianist opens with
an explanation of his performing and recording processes: those
which led to the works being performed live in the Zurich Tonhalle.
Alert readers will note that this eighth volume has been moved
to a different location. Schiff, after providing something of
an admission that the concert for these pieces was less of a success,
decided to re-record the final three sonatas in the empty hall
of the Reitstadel in Neumarkt, a few months after the Zurich performance.
Collectors worried by inconsistency in such a release may have
their concerns validated by hearing the somewhat more cavernous
acoustic of an empty concert hall, and the reduction in the urgent
immediacy, the sense of discovery which the live performances
provided. Hearing these recordings, and I can’t help feeling it
might have been a nice idea for ECM to have released them as a
double CD along with the initial live performances, but if Schiff
wasn’t happy with the ‘original’ recordings then we have to take
it from him that these are satisfactory substitutes.
Satisfactory they
most certainly are, and in any analysis there can be no doubting
András Schiff’s deep-seated response to these works, and his
superlative mastery of both their technical and their spiritual
problems and secrets. Still in possession of my big book of
the sonatas in score form after listening to Vol.VII, I somehow
felt my attention wasn’t initially being held in quite the rapt
fashion it had by that penultimate disc in this series. This
being a first impression, I quite soon decided that an alternative
perspective was needed, and I did some comparison with Emil
Gilels’ 1985 recording of the Sonatas Nos. 30 & 31 on DG,
the one rather portentously marked ‘Seine letzten aufnamen’
419 174-2. Despite or maybe even because of this terminal labelling,
I’ve always found this recording to be rather poetic and luminous,
and it does seem that Gilels somehow reaches that much deeper
into the soul of the music in the Sonata Op.109 than
Schiff. While I admire Schiff for refusing to impose artificial
‘interpretation’ on the music, there is something about these
last sonatas which demands some extra intensity of expression,
some inner wellspring of emotion, which Schiff almost, but not
always seems able to find. Everything is very fine, and his
third movement of the Sonata Op.109 is most certainly
Gesangvoll, but I would argue that the innigster Empfindung
appears to have been left somewhere else.
With the Sonata
Op. 110 we enter a different world, and Schiff seems to
find more form. The little staccato touches in those broken
chords a short way into the first movement are beautifully observed,
the left hand countermelodies perfectly weighted. We seem to
hear Beethoven ruminating and reminiscing, and that improvisatory
quality I enjoyed so much in the earlier recordings is reinstated.
The same goes for the Adagio recitative which opens the
last movement of this sonata. Time seems to stand still, even
when the repeated sixteenth notes start up. Shame about the
out of tune high A-flat, less noticeable earlier, but a bit
of a sore thumb in bar 15. The Fuga brings me straight
back to what I love about Schiff in his Bach recordings: that
gentle evenness of touch and the singing style with which he
is able to bring out the significant themes. The only time I’ve
ever been marginally bothered by Schiff’s expressively ‘late’
right hand in a melodic line is in the L’istesso tempo di
Arioso, where the flow and regularity of the left hand is
as a result distorted just a little too much for my taste. There’s
that high A-flat like a bad tooth in bars 206 and 208, but there
is no denying Schiff’s dramatic build to the final moments,
all the more so from the gentleness of the opening for the final
fugue.
As with the Hammerklavier,
Schiff finds the dramatic and almost operatic in the first movement
of the last Sonata Op.111. Hi-fi piano buffs will love
the strength Schiff has in those left hand gestures, and once
again, he manages to wrest utmost clarity from even the densest
passages where all the pots and pans are flying around. That
high A-flat has thank goodness been re-tuned. In the booklet
notes, Schiff points out that, in his opinion, the instruction
Adagio molto semplice e cantabile should not be read
as Adagio molto, but as Adagio, molto semplice...
His tempo is therefore not “unbearably slow”, but does allow
plenty of space for the music to breathe and develop in with
that natural, inexplicable feeling of intangible inevitability
which is such a strong part of Beethoven’s genius. The impetus
thus provided makes the later variations flow with energy, but
also to move with the rise and fall of an expert ballroom dancer.
This takes away any of the difficulty in all of those repeated
rhythms, which can so easily become repetitive and static. There
is a timeless quality in some passages in the later variations,
and Schiff revels in these Schiff to full, breathtakingly audacious
effect. This final movement certainly shows ‘a way’ in terms
of the developments western music would make in later centuries,
and if you have yet to listen to Beethoven in these terms then
this is certainly a recording which should awaken your senses
to this feeling of continuity. The remarkable uncompromising
modernity of the music is laid entirely bare by Schiff. If you
want to you can allow your imagination to fast forward yourself
through Liszt or Chopin, maybe some impressionism, and all of
this parked next to heavyweights like Busoni and Medtner, Boulez
and beyond, right up to the post-modernist final C major chord,
which disarms just about everything which has gone before –
in this movement, but also through the entire cycle.
Any criticisms of
this release are subjective and ones of degree, and in relation
to the remarkable achievements in the rest of this cycle. I
do have a nagging feel that something of the dramatic immediacy
of the live performances is lost in this rather lonely sounding
final volume, but the quality of the playing and the recording
are such that collectors of the complete edition are unlikely
to be disappointed. As ever, the presentation is gorgeous, with
a few nice facsimiles of Beethoven’s original sketches and the
usual informative and highly readable interview-style notes
from Schiff. ECM have long steered away from their sometimes
over-minimalist style, and these releases are no exception.
Given the calligraphic/cartographic/fossil-record drawings by
Jan Jedlička these are also hard to miss in your local
shop. Even if you are wedded to shelf-loads of favourites in
this repertoire I would still urge you to ‘go for it’ – you
may find your current collection rendered more than a little
redundant.
Dominy Clements
András Schiff
(piano) 
