Old men who insist on climbing mountains are a phenomenon to be wondered at. The late I. A. Richards, godfather of modern literary criticism, did it literally; Arrau does it figuratively, musically and spiritually. The mountain in question on this newest record from Arrau (who is 84 this month) is Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata, gloriously done, and the centrepiece of what is otherwise a rather odd record.
It begins with a performance of Les adieux which is decidedly below par. The recording, full bodied elsewhere on the LP, seems unduly reverberant and the playing, by Arrau's own Formidable standards, is occasionally sketchy. Things are rather better in Op. 27 No. 1, Beethoven's Introit to the imaginative world of his mature piano sonatas. The reading is less clear-eyed than Arrau's earlier one for Philips, more given to sfumato colourings, but it has all the old grandeur and reach. But why, I wonder, does it appear after the Appassionata, towards the end of Side 2? Chronologically this record, like Hamlet's crab, goes backwards. It also divides the Appassionata across two sides.
That Arrau is technically in command of the Appassionata Sonata is barely in question; it seems to be bedded not only in his fingers but in his mind, imagination, gut and sinew in a way that is altogether extraordinary. The torrential finale holds no fear for him: a stupendous unfolding, the more so for its being projected at a properly measured Allegro ma non troppo. No pianist that I know makes the strange fact of the development's repeat so tremendous, like entering again a long tunnel from which we have only recently and gratefully emerged. Why does Beethoven make this unusual repeat? Wilfrid Mellers proposes a solution that Arrau would seem by his playing to endorse: ''Perhaps one can say that the moto perpetuo is a tempest that cannot grow into song, it can, given the courage of the human will, be withstood: which is what Beethoven is doing in experiencing the development's crisis a second time'' (Beethoven and the Voice of God; London: 1983, page 106).
I have quoted Professor Mellers's remarkable book before in writing about these latest Beethoven recordings from Arrau. What he has to say about the first movement of the Appassionata seems to me to sum up better than anything I can think of what it is in the music which Arrau so dauntlessly and thoughtfully identifies. ''In the first movement of the Appassionata Sonata Beethoven carries us through the Tempest that would destroy Music, using the metaphors with the significance they have in Shakespeare. The carrying through is Beethoven's genius, and is the reason why the discipline of his art is necessary. Indeed, such a raw openness to experience as Beethoven attains in the Appassionata might seem to suggest that 'reality' and 'meaning' were for him at times 'absent gods', were it not that this yearning for them alone made life ethically possible'' (Ibid, page 98). It is well said; and to clothe these words in sound you could do no better than seek out Arrau's latest recording.'