The highlight (by some margin) of the Beethoven Day at London’s South Bank Centre last May was Charles Rosen’s leisurely lecture tour around the piano sonatas: a question of tempo here, a detail of fingering or accentuation there ... it was full of the kind of fine insights that make you realize that Beethoven’s texts are inexhaustible in their meaning. There’s always something you hadn’t noticed – a tiny, neglected detail that opens up new fields of possibility.
Is it too much to hope for something similar here? Not at all. Take the surprising return of the Klagender Gesang (“Sorrowful Song”) in the finale of Op. 110. The change of key and mood is certainly dramatic; but, Rosen seems to be saying, most pianists make too much of it. The fortissimo is quickly reduced to piano, and, more importantly still, Beethoven doesn’t mark a break in the texture – or even a pause. In Rosen’s hands the ideas flow from one to the next, and the effect is telling – at least until the Song itself begins. And then? Well, it has to be said that sorrow is not one of Rosen’s pianistic specialities; the singing line is shaped well enough, but the effect is emotionally and tonally rather monochrome. The same could be said of the slow movement of the Hammerklavier. The second theme certainly isn’t – as Beethoven marks it – con grand’espressione (“with great expression”), and at the feverish climax, where repeated quavers seem to strive to say the unsayable, it isn’t always clear whether the notes are being sounded or not. This has nothing to do with Rosen’s relatively fast tempo; others – Maurizio Pollini for instance – have attempted something relatively close to Beethoven’s daunting quaver=92 without losing clarity or pathos.
Still, it was refreshing to hear Rosen in the first two movements of Op. 106. Apart from slight bewilderment over the opening two phrases (my Henle Urtext has the staccato at the end of the first, not the second, as Rosen plays it), I can only admire the fearsome clarity of thought and texture – and at a tempo very close to Beethoven’s impossible-looking minim=138. It makes Emil Gilels on DG sound grandly pedestrian, as does Rosen’s fleet, subversive Scherzo (what a weird movement this is!).
However, it is Gilels, musicologically unreconstructed as he is, that I’d turn to to reveal the secret heart of the Adagio sostenuto and the following ‘Light from Darkness’ transition to the fugal finale. The sound quality may not be wonderful, and Gilels was old and ill at the time he made his recording, but, to adapt Beethoven’s words from the title-page of the Missa solemnis, it goes from the heart, to the heart.'