Beethoven String Quartet Op 127; Piano Sonata Op 101

Perahia strikes out into new territory – and it’s a journey well worth taking

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Ludwig van Beethoven

Genre:

Chamber

Label: Sony Classical

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 57

Mastering:

Stereo
DDD

Catalogue Number: SK93043

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
String Quartet No. 12 Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Murray Perahia, Conductor
Sonata for Piano No. 28 Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer
Murray Perahia, Piano
This is special and puts down a marker for a new phase in Murray Perahia’s career. Recognising that doubts about not being ‘quite ready’ for late Beethoven might always be with him, he has decided to make a start. Well, a touch of humility becomes a performer, and while I’m sure Perahia doesn’t think the only way to approach late Beethoven is on his knees, the distinction of his achievements here is evidence of patient reflection and probing study; the results have been worth waiting for.

Beethoven described Op 101 as ‘hard to play’. Some of the difficulties are akin to those in Beethoven’s next sonata, the so-called Hammerklavier, and the fact that it is half the length of that one doesn’t make its challenges easier. Perahia’s detailed inflection of phrases in the first movement strikes me as over-literal, a bit fussy: I prefer Richard Goode’s more smoothly articulated line. But the rest is superb. Perahia makes the complex polyphony sing in both the quick movements, which are given a thrilling grace and allure. There is an exemplary range of dynamics with spot-on dramatic timing and vividness of gesture. He captures the finale and its play of character better than anyone I can remember – the pastoral, the bucolic, the jocular, the dramatic, the poetic: the sheer Mozartian profusion.

The conjunction of sonata and quartet transcription derives from Perahia’s developing guest-conductor relationship with the ASMF. The late quartets have a reputation as the summa of instrumental music, and in the light of Beethoven’s declaration at the end of his life that he found composition for the piano ‘too limiting’, you can see why a pianist of Perahia’s calibre would want to engage with them. His transcription is not an indulgence; it is direct, straightforward, and much of it works well on the orchestra. But of course, writ large, the music becomes something other. What was a discourse, essentially private, which we were invited to overhear, becomes an oration. As in the Sonata, Perahia contrives a magnificent range of sound and movement, the thrust and directional quality and the detailed expression as convincing here as it was there. And as he says, on the orchestra you do get something that is often very striking: a communication of how Beethoven’s writing in the late quartets influenced the orchestral writing of so many later composers – most immediately, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler.

For me, the quartet transcription will not be for every day. But the playing of the ASMF must certainly be saluted. As one of their violinists, himself a distinguished quartet player, said to me after a concert performance I went to: ‘We couldn’t do this with anybody else, you know’. Quite so. As new Beethoven CDs come, this one rises to the top.

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