I remember being astonished to read in Joachim Kaiser’s Great Pianists of Our Time (George Allen & Unwin: 1971) that Solomon’s name was scarcely known in Germany and that those who did know it thought his playing ‘cold’. Kaiser himself preferred to put it another way: ‘matchless austerity, not severe in the usual sense, but of masterly refinement’. Of Solomon’s Beethoven, he wrote: ‘His interpretations of the Hammerklavier, Les adieux and the Moonlight Sonata have the power of the unfamiliar. Solomon interprets Beethoven in such a way that the works are not in any way “objective” in their effect but are nevertheless more than just the painful or joyful declarations of a real person.’
That is, indeed, the real Solomon: virtuosity married to the finest kind of snail-horn sensibility, personable playing that has the capacity to go beyond personality.
By the autumn of 1956, when a stroke ended Solomon’s career at the absurdly early age of 54, he had recorded 18 of the Beethoven piano sonatas, 12 of which had been released. Had his career continued, the cycle would almost certainly have been revised and completed. The immediate rivals would have been the two cycles Wilhelm Kempff recorded for Deutsche Grammophon (mono 1951-56, stereo 1964-65) and the pre-war Schnabel recordings which EMI reissued in its series Great Recordings of the Century in 1963-64. In the event, Solomon’s cycle remained incomplete, as did later Emil Gilels’s not dissimilar DG cycle.
Some will fret over this (I concede I would dearly love to hear Solomon in the radiant A major Sonata, Op 2 No 2 or the E flat Sonata, Op 7), but sanguine folk will reflect that all the ‘important’ sonatas are here in performances that can generally be reckoned ‘representative’. Testament’s Paul Baily has done a first-rate job on the transfers and the layouts: five CDs, each packed to the gunnels, each logically planned. The only sonata that is significantly out of sequence is Op 111 yet that, curiously, is the one performance from among the late, great sonatas which isn’t entirely up to scratch. Here one does think back to Schnabel. Alongside Schnabel’s not dissimilar reading, Solomon’s sounds scampered (in the first movement), lacking in depth (in the second), and oddly unspontaneous, as though haunted by the knowledge of the older reading. The rather hollow-sounding 1951 recording doesn’t help.
Opus 111 is coupled here (SBT1188) with two of the Op 2 sonatas, the playing by turns fiery and lucid, gracious and gay. If anything is missing, it is the sense of tragic pathos Schnabel finds in the slow movement of the C major Sonata and his radical recklessness of spirit in the two finales. For this reason, I would not choose this disc to make the Solomon ‘case’ to a sceptical collector; nor would I attempt to set Solomon’s performance of the epic Sonata in D, Op 10 No 3 (on SBT1189), ahead of Schnabel’s. What this second disc does contain are celebrated readings of sonatas which c 1950 were the most hackneyed of all, the Moonlight and the Pathetique. Solomon’s reading of the opening movement of the Moonlight is famously long-breathed, his reading of the opening movement of the Pathetique, and the Moonlight’s finale, wonderfully tense and austere.
The remaining three discs strike me as being, quite simply, indispensable, Solomon at the peak of his powers as a Beethoven player. In sonata after sonata, we hear virtuosity of the finest and most discriminating kind put at the service of some of the loftiest yet at the same time physically beautiful and physically exciting music known to man. Solomon was famous for the Cistercian clarity of his quick playing (the Waldstein and Appassionata sonatas passim) and for the concentrated calm of his playing of the great slow movements (this 1952 recording of the Hammerklavier as fine an example as any). Underpinning both these phenomena is a quality of dynamic control that both gratifies the eye (Beethoven’s text lifted off the page with rare precision) and bewitches the ear. It is this latter point which gives Solomon his special ability to define for us that element of unalloyed wonder in Beethoven’s writing, those moments when we are brought to what T S Eliot calls ‘the still point of the turning world’.
And there is more. In the opening movements of the sonatas Opp 90 and 109 Solomon shows great skill in realising those Janus-like tempo indications which seek to match physical energy with a sense of inner repose, a process which reaches its apogee in the A flat Sonata, Op 110, where simple-seeming lines and shapes conjure forth a new kind of musical speaking and imagining. Such is Solomon’s mastery of this, we can happily dispense with Op 111 on this final CD. Op 109 and, after it – though not, please, at a single sitting! – Op 110 make their own lofty quietus.
There are minor disappointments on each of these three final discs. The 1951 recording of Op 54 (SBT1190) is dowdily recorded and would almost certainly have been remade had circumstances allowed. Both the 1956 Op 90 (SBT1191) and the 1954 Op 101 (SBT1192) are good without being a match for what we have elsewhere on the discs. In the case of Op 90, this is Solomon’s legendary elucidation of the Hammerklavier Sonata and his well- nigh definitive account of Les adieux, a performance, humane and vivid, that is fine almost beyond belief.
Les adieux is a particular revelation partly because it was never much reissued. Similarly, though Solomon’s Waldstein appeared several times on LP, his magical and magically contrasted recordings of Op 31 No 2, The Tempest, and Op 31 No 3 also remained somewhat in the shadows. Bryce Morrison, whose superb booklet-notes add further distinction to this release, speaks of the mix of the enigmatic and the scrupulous in Solomon’s playing of The Tempest, the one emerging out of the other. Some slightly strange pedalling in The Tempest (strange because Solomon’s pedalling normally seems so bewitchingly simple) deepens the enigma. By contrast, there is nothing enigmatic about his beautifully paced account of Op 31 No 3, a performance in which the Scherzo successfully reasserts its claim to being the happiest piece of music ever written.'