| REVIEWS: divine art 25029 Beethoven Piano Music (A. Goldstone) | |
Anthony Goldstone’s playing throughout is splendid; technically most expert and always unfailingly musical and genuinely Beethovenian. Listen to the superb way he plays the second movement of the Appassionata: absolutely compelling. As the recording is very good indeed, and Anthony Goldstone provides his own excellent notes, this exceptionally well-filled CD is very strongly recommended. GLASGOW HERALD: Awarded ***** (5 star recording) ALL MUSIC GUIDE: (published on Musicmatch.com)
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE: Goldstone is impatient in the opening movement of the Moonlight, too, and his touch is distinctly heavy for a piece Beethoven wanted played very delicately. Maria João Pires responds more readily to the music’s atmosphere and poetry, making it into something truly memorable. Goldstone is more at home in the turbulent outer movements of the Appassionata, and there’s much to enjoy in his performance, though in the last resort it doesn’t have quite the sense of subdued tension that a pianist such as Alfred Brendel is able to convey. Performance * * * Sound * * * * MUSICWEB: I was a little troubled by the recorded sound at times in the first movement of the Moonlight and there is some unusual rubato. I did not quite follow the logic of some of the tempi changes. Goldstone's approach is not classical but romantic. He succeeds in the middle movement of the Moonlight often wrongly called a minuet. This performance is not feeble as often is the case. He presents it as a Ländler and introduces some humour which devotees of the minuet would not have appreciated. The finale is the only successful music in this sonata and the only movement in sonata form with the second subject in G sharp minor. It is a real concertante movement something of a witches sabbath. The cadenza passages are stirring but again I felt that the piece should have been more like a whirlwind than high winds. Beethoven makes the mistake of lessening the tempo at times and thus hindering the continuity as he does, for example, in the finale of the masterly Symphony no. 4. This movement is played with passion by Goldstone and sometimes with anger, reminding us that the piano is a percussion instrument. He makes the contrast between the dreamy slow movement and the tremendous finale very pronounced. There is a lot of heart in this playing and terrifying explosions. It may not suit everyone but it is fascinating. Beethoven kept falling in love with girls and women of noble birth. The Countess Giulietta Guicciardi is the dedicatee of this sonata composed in 1801. She was about sixteen at the time and Beethoven was thirty. Ignaz Moscheles is an underrated composer in his own right. Here he takes one of the four overtures to Fidelio, the others being Leonora numbers 1, 2 and 3, and makes it into a transcription for solo piano. Moscheles was 24 years younger than Beethoven and survived him by 43 years. This is a labour of love and such noble transcriptions are of great value, not the least being the study of the work by playing it oneself. It appears that Beethoven suggested this arrangement to Moscheles and was delighted with the result. Moscheles settled in London and was responsible for the first British performance of the Missa Solemnis in 1832 - a decent recorded performance of which we really need at the moment. The Pathetique sonata is a better work than the Moonlight structurally and the slow introduction is an amazing piece full of all emotions from anger and power to tenderness. The brisk main allegro is well caught in Goldstone's performance with an excellent choice of tempi and a brave choice too. The cross hand passages are usually awkward but not here, and fitting in those nuisances of mordents is well captured. The drama is not excessive as is the failure of some pianists. The word ‘pathetic’, of course, comes from the word ‘pathos’ and Goldstone realises this very well. He reveals Beethoven's heart, and it was a good one, with all its turmoil and unrequited love. It is not said often enough that Beethoven wrote some very lovely and romantic music. Goldstone's playing enables you to feel both Beethoven's suffering and pain and his joy, something he was always seeking and which inspired the finale of the Choral Symphony. The other characteristic of Goldstone's playing is the delightful tripping style depicting the innocent devilment of the composer. He structures the movement to perfection. The slow movement has been savaged by comedians like Ken Dodd and pop groups and that angers me. I would like to see these great works untouched. Goldstone plays this movement in a matter of fact style which I admire. Too many people play it as sticky toffee - what in stage shows is called 'milking it'. Some may prefer a more cantabile tone but as absolute music it works well. His left hand arpeggios are secure and sinister. The colour in this performance is admirable. The movement is not a pretty and lush piece but dark, perhaps stark and that is how it should be played. But it seldom is; it is here, though. The rondo finale is not as easy as some make out. Again Goldstone has a good choice of tempo and he brings out some of Beethoven's fascinating harmonies which can only be appreciated fully by musicians themselves. I love the way Goldstone eases into the main theme when it returns. Again Beethoven has a few slower passages which hinder continuity. The variations on God save the King are not trivial but very clever. Beethoven was a master at most things including variations. The problem is that the tune is trite and only the prejudiced would deny that pompous over-dignified tunes are somewhat lacking. Stiff and stuffy music, Boult called it. However, Beethoven liked the tune and when he turns it into a march-like theme it works. In one of the gentle variations the harmonies are both remarkable and choice. The Appassionata is an intrigue. I believe Beethoven still had Giulietta Guiccardi in mind, or some other female above his station; poor man, he was unlucky in love. Clearly he adored many young women and unrequited love is the most bitter pill to swallow. This is very difficult sonata to play not only technically but structurally. See how Beethoven starts it with an arousal of his feeling, the bass heart-beats and sheer excitement before that tune being first tender then angry. The felicitous high music and rumbling bass heart-beats lead into that luscious theme. And, my, how Goldstone brings out the passion. The excitement mounts into a frenzy of love with passionate pyrotechnics. This pianist has really caught it. Beethoven is in turmoil again with all sorts of thoughts pervading his mind. I repeat he was a man with a heart and it was a good one. How would his life have changed if he had married? And if the marriage had been happy? The heartbeats pound away. One wishes one could go back to 1806 and solve Beethoven's private life but not until after this masterpiece was complete. Very impressive both from Beethoven and Goldstone! When one encounters such a great movement one wonders if the rest of the work can match it. The slow movement has a rather introspective but simple theme in two parts and a set of variations which eventually ascends from the depths to the higher range of the piano. There is glitter and that dark hue of the slow movement of the Pathetique. Here, again, Goldstone triumphs with his profound understanding of the music; no mean feat. In fact, it is probably true to say that only those of us who play these masterworks really can evaluate performances of them. Take another example: Goldstone’s chords are so even and you hear all the notes. I can think of one or two so-called great pianists where this does not happens. A fate theme seems to hurl us into the finale which eventually sounds like a torrential rain-storm. It is fearsomely difficult to play on many counts, but Goldstone is man enough for it. Again Beethoven's good heart is shown. The theme has the character of persistence, of not giving up and an optimism which Beethoven is seldom acknowledged as having. The pianist here brings a variety of colour to the movement. The final presto section is music in overdrive. The final track is the opening movement of the C minor sonata but with the 'conventional' repeat. I do not want to breach copyright and so I will leave you to read Goldstone's notes which accompany the disc. INTERNATIONAL RECORD REVIEW: There is in fact a more significant reason for coupling the three present sonatas, in each of which Beethoven absorbed and transformed the idiom of Haydn’s Sturm und Drang. The ‘und’ between storm and stress can whisper suggestively; the svelte, diminutive C sharp major of the Trio of the concluding minor-mode Menuet in Haydn’s Piano Sonata, Hob.XVI:36 is surely the source of Beethoven’s lissom D flat major Allegretto that mediates between the outer movements of the Moonlight. Just before I listened to these discs, a detail on the Divine Art back panel caught my attention: the final track 12 is described “as track 5 but with conventional repeat”. Since track 5 is the first movement of the Pathétique this could only mean one thing, and a quick look at Anthony Goldstone’s lucid booklet note confirmed that at the end of the first-movement exposition he repeats not just Beethoven’s main Allegro di molto e con brio, but also his entire Grave introduction. The distinguished pianist/scholar Denis Matthews evidently did this as well. After listening to Goldstone’s track 5 I immediately switched to Freddy Kempf’s Pathétique, expecting to hear the more usual repeat of the Allegro alone. But another surprise was in store, as Kempf also repeats the Grave, for which the BIS booklet note cites Artur Schnabel’s edition of the sonata as a further precedent. There is an earlier genre that casts further light on this: the French overture as perfected by J.S.Bach. There, a slow, fiery dotted-rhythm introduction is followed by a fugal Allegro, but in both the Partita No. 6 in E minor, BWV830 and the ‘additional’ Partita in B minor, BWV831 (better known as the Overture in the French Manner) Bach returns to the slow introduction at the end of his first movement, providing a clear model for the repetition of the Grave in the Pathétique. To hear the latter played in this way is utterly fascinating. The difference is not so much one of duration (about a minute and a half) as of overall proportions, and whether repeating the Grave reinforces or diminishes the effect of Beethoven’s foreshortenings of it before the development and in the coda is a question for the individual listener to decide. Both Goldstone and Kempf give an appropriately cogent performance of the Pathétique. Neither double-dots the rhythms of the Grave in baroque style – if anything , they sometimes add weight to the shorter notes with expressive effect. Kempf graphically simulates Beethoven’s fp attacks by releasing, and where necessary renewing, the pedal after a chord is struck. They are warmly lyrical in the Adagio cantabile and fleet-fingered in the Rondo, but in the Moonlight Sonata their approaches are more divergent. Goldstone plays the nocturnal Adagio sostenuto that suggested the work’s epithet with less emphasis on the ‘sostenuto’, creating the effect of a fluid improvisation. Here, Kempf is more poised and considered, but with hypnotic results, Both pianists unleash the thunder and lightning of the Appassionata, though the recording acoustic of the Divine Art can sound overly resonant in the sonata’s more vehement textures. The comparative track and two extra pieces add substance to the Goldstone recording, but either disc is worth having in its own right. INTERNATIONAL PIANO: Well, a clear scholarly purpose lies behind at least Anthony Goldstone’s recording for The Divine Art of the Pathétique, unusually with the first movement’s exposition repeat including the entire Grave introduction. To do otherwise, as he writes in the booklet (quoting Denis Mathews), unbalances the “dual-tempo movement and makes nonsense of the ‘first-time bar’ pause”. To prove his point, he adds a bonus track of the whole first movement with the conventional repeat from the start of the Allegro di molto e con brio. However, as Jean-Pascal Vachon notes in his accompanying essay to BIS’ rival newcomer, older editions such as those by Kalmus and Schnabel, included the introduction as a whole in the repeat—which is also how Freddy Kempf plays the work. The two performances make for intriguing if unexpected comparisons. Goldstone’s is undeniably the product of intimate knowledge and long experience of the score through the fingertips as much as the eye, yet his is substantially the swifter, by over two-and-a-half minutes. This is not due to any lack of impulsion on Kempf’s part; indeed there is something of the impulsive, a young man’s music-making here, with extremes of tempo close in spirit to Beethoven’s intentions. Goldstone is noticeably fleeter throughout the first two movements, preferable in the lovely central Adagio cantabile where Kempf seems to me more generically ‘modern’ (and slightly too slow), albeit beautifully phrased. The same virtues and differences of approach colour the Moonlight and Appassionata. There’s little to choose between them in the latter though in the Moonlight Kempf’s dreamier, more impressionistic way with the opening span won me over, aided by BIS’ sensational sound. By comparison, the close acoustic of Wisbech Grammar School for Goldstone seems harsh (though never claustrophobic) and may be rather more in keeping with the acoustic Beethoven might expected. (For the sound, wait for Ronald Brautigam to reach these in his fortepiano series, also for BIS; John Kitchen enthusiastically reviewed the first volume, including the Pathétique in the November/December issue.) Goldstone throws in two extras apart from the alternative Pathétique movement: the delightful Variations on “God Save the King”, which should be much better known, and Moscheles’ splendid transcription of the “Fidelio” Overture. So which then is preferable? For interpretation I do prefer Goldstone’s clear-sighted views of these works, but there’s no denying the ravishing nature of BIS’ sound, which matches Kempf’s ardent, more heart-on-the-sleeve approach. You could always buy both. UK Regional Press (11 local newspapers):
|