DG's booklet says nothing at all about Rudolf Serkin and tells us only that Austrian Radio was responsible for this recording, which was made in the Konzerthaus in Vienna in October 1987. There is applause before the first sonata and after Op. 111, but nothing in between, and I make the assumption that what we're given is an edited montage of long takes from perhaps two public recitals. I think I detect one or two junctures where we go from one take to another, but the sound is pretty consistent and, given the circumstances very acceptable. It is sonorous, bright, resplendent; it sounds like Serkin. The extraneous noises are not too difficult to live with. The most unwelcome of them is a squeaky pedal in the second variation of the Arietta of Op. 111; and I'm delighted to report that there's much less of Serkin's 'singalong' than usual. His smudges and imperfections are amazingly few when one considers that he was in his 85th year when these performances were set down. Worst of the lacunae is a missing bass note in the treacherous trio of the scherzo of Op. 110.
There has of course been some falling-off in the finesse of his playing. Although his stamina and the manipulative aspects of his technique are still in excellent order, one is conscious of more weight on the keys, generally, and the lack of sustained quiet playing tells against this record a little, perhaps most of all in the arioso of the last movement of Op. 110. The line here is etched and controlled as few could, but when the klagender Gesang comes round again, after the first fugue, it requires a bit of a leap of the imagination to hear it as ermattet (''weary'', ''exhausted''), Beethoven's marking. Gilels (also DG) is incomparably touching in these pages and makes the arioso on its recurrence sound almost hesitant. His versions of Op. 109 and Op. 110 I would not be without, and I would rank his Op. 109, the E major Sonata, as one of the best ever put on record.
Serkin's Op. 109 is not that. It may be irreproachable intellectually but it is much less songful than Gilels's and, I think, less sheerly eventful; and there's sometimes a wilful air about the way poetry is projected in a sort of prose version—try the theme of the Variations. It is not at all my wish to play one master pianist off against another, far from it, but the playing does not seem to be very affectionate and I find this part of the recital disappointing. Not the rest, however. In Op. 110 Serkin seems to have regained poise: the beginning, given plenty of air, immediately comes off the page. Notwithstanding the circumscribed dynamic range, there is plenty of colour and no lack of warmth. If Gilels is the more obviously colourful, Serkin is the more classical, wonderfully sure in his pacing; when he reaches the end you feel he has made you aware of how everything belongs together, the surprises and the inspirations of the moment, sounding as if Beethoven had just improvised them, along with the rest. Of the three pianists I've been listening to, he is the only one to have noticed that when the fugue in the last movement reappears, with the theme inverted, Beethoven asks for a new colour with the direction sempre una corda.
The other pianists present only two of the late sonatas, not the triptych. In Op. 111 the comparison with Barenboim (again, DG), half Serkin's age, is as one would expect, the younger man going for high contrasts and heaven-storming in the first movement, and rather overplaying his hand, I think. I do not warm to readings of this allegro which give the impression of veering continually from one extreme to another, from fast and furious to slow and nearly stationary. Serkin shows how much is to be gained in coherence from interpreting the text as Beethoven marked it and by avoiding exaggeration. His performance, if lacking some of the fieriness of Barenboim's, is trenchant enough for all that and much more satisfying in its steadier intellectual control. Similarly in the Arietta, where Barenboim feels the need to be as slow as he dares, and ends up by sounding interminable, Serkin finds the right tempo, the right simplicity and gravity and songfulness, and above all the right sound, as if there could be no hesitation about how to meet the molto semplice e cantabile the composer specifies. The variations accumulate, and when the music takes wing in the long transfigured coda it is as if all Serkin had to do was to release the spring of it. There is more to it than that, of course, but in getting to the heart of these matters he shows how important it is to pare away the inessentials. That is his great strength.'