How good to find the early F minor Sonata, Op. 2 No. 1—chosen by the composer to launch his great series of 32—included alongside the Moonlight and the Appassionata in a recital featured on the sleeve as ''Beethoven … Popular Piano Works''. With so many of his own inimitable fingerprints in every bar, it certainly ought to win all hearts. The impressionable Margalit captures all its youthful urgency with effortless fluency and a stylishly crystalline touch. I enjoyed this performance more than anything else on the record.
The sleeve-note writer in fact refers to the work as Beethoven's ''little Appassionata''. So how apt to couple it with the big Appassionata written some ten years later. By this time, of course, Beethoven had moved lock, stock and barrel from the classical eighteenth into the romantic nineteenth century—as the opening movement makes particularly clear. But despite its unpredictable self-generation, this movement needs an underlying rhythmic stability—which Margalit wholly fails to provide. For me, her constantly changing tempo weakens, rather than strengthens, characterization. But she brings a much firmer hand to the central variations (respecting the con moto qualifying its Andante) and in the finale suggests some underlying demonic drive, even if taking it slightly faster than some players might think commensurate with the composer's Allegro ma non troppo.
As for the Moonlight, with which the record begins, I much enjoyed her grave opening moonscape and her truly agitated though always clear-textured finale. But I thought the central Allegretto just a little too choppy a jog-trot, partly because of fastish tempo, and partly because of over-marked dots and rests. My overall impression was of listening to a woman's rather than a man's Beethoven. But everything is genuinely felt, and the recording is natural enough in tonal reproduction.'