It was only recently, when I was listening to selected comparisons for a review of Stephen Kovacevich’s fine new account of Beethoven’s three Op. 31 Sonatas (EMI, 11/95), that I was alerted to the extraordinary qualities of Alfred Brendel’s emergent third complete recorded cycle of the sonatas. Of particular interest was a towering, emotionally bracing and musically many-sided account of the great D minor Sonata, the Tempest (Philips, 7/93). Since then, none of the discs having previously come my way for review, I have been doing a certain amount of catching up.
The latest disc in the series comes with a booklet essay by William Kinderman (Kinderman the scholar-pianist happily complementing Brendel the pianist-scholar) entitled “Intimacy and Pastoralism”. It is a fine essay that helps explain the rationale behind the particular juxtaposition of sonatas we have on the new disc. Yet it is also an essay which is subverted by the performances themselves. Kinderman reminds us that the nickname Pastoral was given to the D major Sonata by the publisher Cranz of Hamburg, “The title is not unfitting”, he adds. Now, no one would have raised an eyebrow if that remark had appeared on the LP sleeve of Brendel’s logical, luminously beautiful 1964 Turnabout recording of the Pastoral Sonata (reissued as part of a two-disc Vox set). The trouble is, Brendel’s newest recording of the Pastoral banishes once and for all any lingering faith we might have had in the musical or literary judgement of the publisher Cranz.
Brendel’s reading of the Pastoral has changed – and its status has stratospherically soared – in two interrelated respects. In the first place, the two outer movements are both slower than on either the 1960s Turnabout recording or the 1970s Philips version (most readily available on Philips as part of a two-disc set). In effect, both movements – the first as well as the last – are now Allegro ma non troppo. Some will think the opening movement too slow, but that would be to ignore the thrilling way Brendel now opens up the musical argument. What we have here is not some amiable musical ramble; rather, it is a multi-layered music-drama in which the pianist’s relish in debating the issues the music is already asking itself makes for the most exhilarating kind of listening.
And what a debate it is, substantial and charged with feeling. I have never heard the lead back to the recapitulation – the lurch into B major, the sudden silence, the restatement in B minor, a further silence, the unresolved question on the home dominant – realized with quite such heart-stopping intensity as here.
But, then, intensity is very much the order of the day in this latest cycle of recordings, a throwing open of the gates, with a far greater use of declamatory effects and rhetorical tropes than was the case in either of the two earlier cycles. Not that Brendel has thrown overboard any of his wryness, wit or natural sense of balance. He plays the two inner movements of the Pastoral Sonata every bit as elegantly as before. And yet here again one notices sudden deepenings and new-found beauties: the slow movement’s extraordinary, enigmatic close – here timed and sounded to perfection – giving way on the instant to the lovely high floating F sharp with which the Scherzo begins its enchanted journey.
The performance of the E flat Sonata, Op. 7 is similarly grand, open and free-spirited. And here a word needs to be said about the recordings, which are thrillingly loyal to the music-making. The sound, like the playing, can be both grand and awesomely quiet. Above all, it offers a persistently clear view of the rich ensemble of inner voices that is so vital to Brendel’s purpose. In terms of inner clarity, the recording is on a par with Kempff’s 1960s stereo cycle for DG, but it has even greater range, and (happily) a fuller bass.
At bar 17 of the Op. 7 Sonata’s Largo con gran espressione, Kempff gives a quick arpeggiated flick to the chord. Not the kind of thing a purist would approve of. (Even Backhaus eschews such a trick.) And Brendel at this point in the new recording? Well, like Furtwangler incarnate, he sounds the bottom C sharp and only then allows the chord to build above it. It is a revealing moment, and a magnificent one. I still think Schnabel draws from this great slow movement a greater sense of tragic pathos than any of his rivals. But, on record at least, Schnabel takes a rather winsome view of the sonata’s finale whose wonderfully fading farewell of a final page has rarely been more grandly or more movingly judged than by Brendel on this newest recording.
After such considerate riches, the engagingly brief G major Sonata makes a delightful postlude. and again Brendel has changed tack, playing the second of the two movements, the Tempo di Menuetto much more swiftly than previously. Played like this is sounds wonderfully fresh and gamesome, the perfect envoi to an enthralling disc.ROR1 '9602081'