Karim Said is a Jordanian pianist who comes with high praise from Colin Davis and Daniel Barenboim. And here, as with an increasing number of his contemporaries, he shows a healthy disregard for conservative programming, blending the old and the new, yet finding a truth hidden in convention. For him – as for Glenn Gould and more recently Can Çakmur, and above all Maurizio Pollini – there is a vital need to present music as a constantly evolving rather than a museum art, to break the glass ceiling created most particularly by Schoenberg in the diverting and emancipation of tonality. Naturally, Schoenberg, in common with all true musical pioneers, paid a heavy price for his sense of the necessarily new (he described Bizet, Stravinsky and Ravel as ‘those mediocre kitschmongers’) and found himself dismissed as a bogeyman, and ‘degenerate’ (via Nazi ideology).

In one sense Said’s programme is sufficiently distinctive as to make comparison with other pianists’ performances of individual works largely irrelevant. And yet I wish that the natural affinity he shows for Schoenberg and Webern had extended to his Mozart and Beethoven. In the former’s F major Sonata, K332, he ploughs an honest and determined furrow unrelieved by a greater sense of buoyancy and uplift. A welcome touch of bravura in the finale comes too late to redeem his tenacious (but, in the central Adagio, vulnerable) hold on the score.

Again, if Beethoven’s Eroica Variations are your prime interest, you will be disheartened by a now familiar failure to break free, to relish to the full one of the composer’s most inventive and exuberant masterpieces. With pianists of the stature of Schnabel, Brendel, Richter, Gilels and most recently Cédric Tiberghien in the catalogue, this is hard to recommend. The Webern Variations, too, have appeared on record with a characteristically vivid intensity from Piotr Anderszewski, while Pollini’s DG recording of Schoenberg’s piano music – including the Piano Concerto – remains an ultimate in finesse and authority.

This article originally appeared in the Autumn 2024 issue of International Piano. Never miss an issue – subscribe today