Customer Reviews

Beethoven- Die Späten Klaviersonaten (Late Piano Sonatas): Opp. 101, 106, 109, 110, 111

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I fondly remember the time I bought the distinctive green LP box set of these recordings in the late 1970s.

I was not very familiar with the Beethoven piano sonatas. I made many attempts to try them out by auditioning the local library copies by well known artists, or whatever there was in the scant record collection at the college radio station music library. All to no avail. The music just didn't click for me.

I read some of the rave reviews about these Pollini recordings for a few months, so one day I just decided to bite the bullet and buy the LP box set. I was determined that if I'd give all the works in it enough thorough and attentive listening, I would understand why the music is so loved by so many.

Well, it didn't take much determination. From the first beat of op. 101, I got hooked. Pollini's unusual combination of high energy and contrasting effective tenderness made the music come alive for me.

When I got to the famous op. 106 "Hammerklavier", I must have replayed it 4 times the first night.

The LPs were worn out quickly. Actually, I liked them so much I took even more care than I normally would, and I was pretty picky about LP care in those days. I was not about to see these LPs get thrashed!

Time has brought me around to appreciate the Beethoven 32 in ways that I never thought I could. I now treasure such notables as Kempff, Arrau, Brendel, and many more. Pollini seems somewhat excessive in comparison to most of the artists I now revere in this reportoire. But there is room for much interpretation in Beethoven, and I find myself returning to these Pollini recordings often just to remeber how much more there is to these pieces than is often rendered in more "classical" and accepted interpretations.

Severely disappointed was I when these recordings first appeared on CD in the 1980s. The first CD versions were dreadfully riddled with a resonant twang that marred virtually every movement in every sonata at some point. The LPs were OK, but this music, especially with the high dynamic contrast of Pollini's playing, demand hushed quiet to be appreciated. CDs psomised some that hushed quietness, being free from crakcles, hiss, and so on. But the timber of the piano was very unnatural. Listening to those CDs was very painful.

Once again, DG have redeemed themselves by remastering these spectacular analogue recordings in the late 1990s to give us what have before us now. The Originals series continually give us CDs that approach the warmth and naturalness of analogue LPs. Thanks Universal. Give us more.

After reviewing many releases in the Originals series though, it is time I do criticize DG about one aspect in their reissues that is not "Orgiinal". The liner notes. Like most of the other releases in the series, there are virtually no notes about the works themselves. The only notes are about the performer, in this case Pollini, and perhaps the performers' affinity for the music on the disk, or something special about the particular recording. In this case, the original LP box set had excellent essays about the late sonatas. I read them several times, and picked more insights with each reading. The lack of notes about the works on the disk make it difficult to recommend any items in the Originals series as first choices for collectors that are not going to buy multiple versions. But that is exactly what these should be. So get with it, Universal, and next time give us ALL of the Originals, inculding the notes.

Maurizio Pollini is unlike any other pianist in the history of music. The son of an architect, he has an astonishing memory and is endowed with the uncanny ability to evoke an organic sense of wholeness in nearly every piece he has undertaken to play. His technical gifts - supernatural articulation, voicing, pedalling, accuracy - are unsurpassed. Yet his remarkable control ennables Pollini to play with utter freedom and spontaneity, a paradox that is not widely understood even by professional musicians and critics. The more familiar the repertoire, the more revelatory his approach often seems to be.

This is very much the case with these performances, certainly the finest of Pollini's Beethoven recordings. The late sonatas require precisely the same gifts with which this pianist has been blessed like no other: lucidity, simplicity, an often terrifying intensity that yields to the most tender lyricism. There is no place in late Beethoven, nor in Pollini's sensibility, for generic expressivity of any kind. Every phrase is distilled to its essence, but without a trace of premeditation. Pollini gives us a remarkably clear window into the liberative spirituality of a composer for whom most egoic concerns had been subsumed in his artistic struggle. If the late sonatas are important to you, don't hesitate to buy this record - you'll hear the performances of a lifetime.

First of all, if you're a Beethoven neophyte still trying to pick up the basics and wondering whether his late sonatas are worth getting, I have one thing to say to you: drop EVERYTHING. You need his late piano sonatas, and you need them now. Not only are these works profoundly emotional in the way his late work almost always was, but they're technically dazzling and so inventive that later composers were still exploring the avenues he'd opened up for almost a century. In the monumental Opus 106 "Hammerklavier", Beethoven managed not only to write a piece so difficult that even the great virtuosi (except for Pollini, and that's one of the many reasons to buy this recording) tend to make a few mistakes, but also to practically invent Chopin in the process. In the Opus 111, the very last one, not only does Beethoven bare his soul with as much emotion as this tormented composer ever revealed, but in the process he blows apart sonata form altogether, does some things with rhythm in the second movement that wouldn't get picked up again until jazz came along(check out about 6:30 into track 8 if you don't believe me), and makes a shimmeringly gorgeous farewell, making those 20 minutes the best 20 minutes of piano music I'm aware of.

Pollini, never faulted for his almost-inhuman technique (as I said before, check out the Hammerklavier), is sometimes called unemotional because his playing is so razor-sharp, and because he refuses to let his playing fall into the trap of over-sentimentality. There are times this is true, mostly when he plays late Romantic works, which are SUPPOSED to be a little schlocky. Beethoven, though, is a different story: the paradoxical composer who managed to have all the power over structure of the Classical era before him, while using that incredible control (much like Pollini) in ever-more-innovative and personal ways to produce works evoking depths of emotion beyond anything that had been heard before.

What all this means, for this recording, is that Pollini manages to pull off the same paradoxical feat as Beethoven: having all the virtuosic skill, all the sense of the logic of these pieces, while pulling out some terribly profound feeling from these works. He does it by being so faithful to the score that, as one reviewer below did, you could read along without ever noticing a deviation from the composer's extremely precise directions (including some faster-than-traditional tempi that, in my opinion, make these works a lot more interesting than the wishy-washy feeling of performances by people like Kempff). On the other hand, this supreme grasp of the technical aspects leaves Pollini free to play it _naturally_, with the unexaggerated but supremely poignant emotion of someone who simply lets the music flow through them. Highlights include, well, everything, but especially the Opus 111(perfection!), the Hammerklavier, and the Opus 101. Truly a master performance, and I've never heard better.

I understand the controversy that surrounds some of Pollini's recordings of 19th century music. He's known for being a bit clinical or emotionally aloof. It's been said that his interpretive approach is often at odds with works that demand a more direct emotional involvement and "heart-on-sleeve" style from the performer. If one compares some of his recordings of "Romantic" era piano literature with those done by much older (or earlier) artists, it's apparent that only people like Backhaus (sp?) seemed to share Pollini's affinity for Stravinsky's dictum: "just play what's in the score, and the rest will speak for itself."

Not surprising then, that this pianist excells so much in repertoire like Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and other 20th century composers, and even gives such music a powerful emotional pull that (arguably) exceeds what he's able to do with the Romantics. Perhaps he's more comfortable with works of a certain unique complexity, compositions that already give so much detail through the score, that there's little more for the artist to add? One of the few Romantics he's truly celebrated for playing has been Chopin, a composer who himself, was not a great lover of Romantic music (HIS heros were Bach and Mozart). Pollini addresses that Chopin when he plays, the enigmatic, reserved, "unknowable" side of Chopin, the one who never gives all his secrets. There too, Pollini hits his emotional stride, and merges well with works like the piano concertos, and other similar pieces.

So why Beethoven? Why particulary the late piano sonatas? How did one of the all-time interpreters of 20th century piano music come to record one of the most discussed and listened-to sets of these particular works in all recorded history? Perhaps much of the answer lies in the very nature of these pieces, the last of their kind that Beethoven would ever write. The old master by this time in his life had already written plenty of barnstormers like the sonata "Appassionata", the "Waldstein", the "Emperor Concerto", and other such works, as well as the quieter and more lyrical piano pieces like the "Pastoral" sonata and 4th concerto. These compositions, for all their differences, are bound together by a singular emotional directness, a sense of the composer speaking to the listener "with both feet planted firmly on the ground". This dialogue between Beethoven and the listener was to change radically by the time the last 5 sonatas (and quartets, incidently) were being written. After a 5 year period of relatively little creative activity, and many turbulant personal changes, a very enigmatic, less earthbound creative voice emerges. Gone are the trappings of his earlier style, with the narrative forms, and the 'epic' battles between darkness and light. Even "melodies" and "main themes" are replaced a good deal of the time by improvisational-sounding sequences and shifting blocks of abstract line and harmony (particularly in the first movements of the E major and A flat sonatats, and in the transition between the 3rd and 4th movements of the "Hammerklavier"). Sonata form has been discarded in favor of fantasia, fugue, and theme-and-variation. Even the parameters between some of the sonata movements themselves, have been blurred beyond recognition. With all this, the dialogue has ended, and we are now simply overhearing the composer's thoughts.

So who better to traverse this maze of musical thought than Pollini? Other pianists favored more by a couple of the other reviewers do indeed imbue their performances with a greater emotional directness, at least when the music grants the oppertunity. However, when the music decides to shift into the abstract, and the lyrical moments give way to the more jagged, expressionistic episodes, some of these same celebrated artists seem-well...a bit lost. Hearing Serkin, for instance, play the "Hammerklavier" makes me love his courage more than anything else. Perhaps Schnabel, out of all the older pianists (even with his weaker chops) has the most success with it all. But then again, Schnabel was also an atonalist composer who created some of the most fiendishly complex abstract music for piano of the early 20th century.

So again, who better to interpret this music than someone who has the sense of detail and insight (and grasp of the musically obtuse) of a Schnabel, but with the technique and command of phrase and color of...maybe Hofmann(?), and finally the emotional commitment of a Richter (another pianist who knew how to express with great intensity and reserve at the same time)? There is not a single page of this music that he has not found a way to get inside of, and the stickier the passage, the more he seems to rise to the occasion in every way, and makes you "get it". Far from being "dry", the interpretation, like the music itself speaks to the listener from beyond the realm of simple earthly passion, and even the pain in it seems as if filtered through a profound state of spiritual bliss.

Dry? Clinical? Not if Pollini is heard in just the right repertoire, and with completely open ears.

Forget about the debate on whether or not Pollini has the highest dynamic control and technical facility among all living pianists, as when it comes to this partcicular set of recordings (made in June 1975 for op. 109 and 110, Sept. 1976 for op.106, Jan. 1977 for op. 101 and 111) this debate is completely irrelevant.
What a sublime, intense and wondefully heart-warming interpretation of Beethoven's late sonatas. A sprititual experience. Please do listen to other greats like Brendel, Arrau, Kempff, Rubenstien, and then listen to Pollini's; in these particular works, Mr. Pollini will make you forget that you have ever heard these pieces before. The music flows as new and fresh as it must have sounded in the great composer's head.

What a delicious op. 101.
What an unforgetable performance of the Hammerklavier, with its slow movement so deeply medidative and its third movement almost rising to other-wordly dimensions. And for the first time, you will thoroughly enjoy the Fugue. You will never get enough of the elegance and beauty of op. 109, 110. As for op. 111, words do not rise to the occasion. Pollini's interpretation leaves one speachless: dramatic, deeply felt, highly noble, and yet spontaneous and flowing like un unstoppable stream. As another reviewer put it: Perfect...a fitting performance of Beethoven's last piano sonata.

Some may not know that Mr. Pollini is also a humble and approachable artist. If you hear his interviews or talk to him after a concert, he will tell you that he records pieces only after having played them extensively in public performances. What an impressive artist: the magical journey of discovery he produced in the 70's with this recording set is being produced again with new ones, such as the Apassionata recording released in March 2003.

These discs have been praised a lot, and rightfully. Maurizio Pollini's journey through the late Beethoven sonatas is a classic, a standard recording since it has appeared on LP in the seventies. Even those who find Pollini's readings too rigid and cold (I certainly don't) will have to admit that the clarity and force of his approach are just phenomenal. Still, there's more to this music, and you have not heard these sonatas in their entirety before you've heard Arrau, Schnabel, Solomon, Brendel and others alongside Pollini. There is more than one way to ascend the Mount Everest of Music, after all.

I know very little of Maurizo Pollini, but he plays through Beethoven's late piano sonatas wonderfully. Opus 106 "Hammerklavier" is stunning, and opus 111 is especially beautiful. You will not be disappointed in these CDs.

I am an amateur pianist and organist (having played some form of keyboard instrument for 16 years), and I still cannot imagine how anyone begins to approach works like the Beethoven late sonatas. I've had college professors who I know wouldn't dare to touch them. And so it is a feat of incredible musical accomplishment simply to learn these masterworks. To commit performances of them to the permanent historical record takes an even more Herculean effort (and a self-assurance that borders on egomania).
But to do what Pollini has done here is simply superhuman. Again, I cannot imagine the countless hours spent poring over details that would probably seem minute and insignificant to the rest of us Philistines. But Pollini's efforts (his long recording hiatus in which he had time for such intensive study) have left us with a musical legacy that will not soon be approached by any pianist, even the most accomplished.
Just listen to Charles Rosen's account of the Hammerklavier. Then compare it to Pollini's. Rosen is arguably the world's most intelligent writer on the subject of Western classical music, and he is a great and accomplished pianist in his own right. But he proves in the opening pages of the Hammerklavier that he is incapable of rising to the kind of challenge that Pollini has laid down. You can hear it in the descending line of chords that alternate between right and left hands, especially the offbeat chords in the left hand that create a sense of displacement - Pollini's are absolutely crystal clear, and there is never the slightest sense that either the vertical (read tempo) or horizontal (read melodic arc) aspects of the piece are in danger. With Rosen, one gets the feeling like maybe he's just about to fall apart (listen to the mushiness of the chords and the tempo that momentarily flies forward), when finally the technical demands lessen and Rosen again seizes control.
That is only an example. If I listen to this recording for 100 years, I am convinced that I will never fully exhaust the musical riches contained therein. One other reviewer had it right- Glenn Gould is the only pianist that can hold a candle to this kind of technical facility (perhaps we may include Richter as well). Every Pollini recording is an event. I suggest you buy them all. They are rare specimens of a reservoir of musical intelligence that runs deeper than we poor sinners could ever fathom.

I just listened to Pollini's recordings of Beethoven's late sonatas again after a few years exploring other recordings, such as Brendel's fine cycle from the 1990s, Schnabel, Solomon, and so on. As much as I love those other recordings, Pollini's set is still invigorating and profoundly moving, probably my favorite.

What I find remarkable is how, by starting from a close fidelity to Beethoven's detailed notations, Pollini is able to uncover an entire world of musical expressivity. Supported by a well-engineered recording that holds its own 30 years later, Pollini brings our attention to all sorts of details and shadings that often pass by unnoticed, but which add to our understanding of the music and its cumulative emotional and intellectual impact. For instance, this time I noticed more of the underlying thematic connections between Opp. 109, 110 and 111, which really do have to be understood as a triptych. I also heard more allusions to Baroque music, which I'm quite sure Beethoven intended and which Pollini subtly brings out.

So is there anything lacking? I think Brendel is better at bringing out the humor in Beethoven. Perhaps the Allegro Molto (2nd movement) in Op. 110 could have been more volatile. Perhaps the great Adagio Sostenuto from the "Hammerklavier" sonata could be a bit more "Appassionato e con molto sentimento." On the other hand, Pollini doesn't make that same movement painfully slow like some other pianists do, and he always maintains clarity of structure. The Adagio Sostenuto is in the sonata form, which is very unusual for a middle movement. This is what gives the movement such weight and tension, and it's important for listeners to be able to follow it despite all its complexities. If you stretch that movement out too much---some recordings run over 20 minutes!--there's a danger that the listener can lose touch with its underlying driving force. In that regard, Pollini's performance succeeds beautifully.

Now if you're looking for the ever-elusive state of mystical transcendence there's plenty of that to spare in Pollini's performance of the Arietta from Op. 111. What's amazing is that in that same recording, he performs so cleanly that you can practically write down every note and dynamic marking while you're listening!

To sum up, Pollini's set may not be the only game out there, but it's still arguably unsurpassed. It's also an ideal recording for those who are hearing these pieces for the first time, because of Pollini's fidelity to the score. If you listen to Pollini's recordings carefully, you'll get to know the music really well and develop an appreciation for its underlying architcecture. This deeper intellectual understanding, as Pollini well knows, is in no way a impediment to feeling, but rather its true pathway.

Giving a hearty recommendation to this recording would not do it justice. The sound is quite good and the performances are simply spectacular. I'm lucky enough to have complete works by Kempff, Claude Frank, Bernard Roberts, and Ashkenazy (excerpts). They are most worthy masters in their own right but for me, this set really speaks from the heart. There is incredible intensity in some passages combined with a poignancy that is difficult to ignore. I am rather puzzled that theses works are viewed by some as cold and overly technical. Though technically superb, I would not refer to this work as cold by any standard. Listen to to the Adagio Sustenuto on sonata 29 and decide for yourself. Possibly the finest recording I have yet heard of that piece. Upon an initial hearing I had to replay it two more times to believe my ears.

One of the most enjoyable features of this recording is the tempo of the pieces. The quicker passages have all the necessary flair and the slower movements are played with a deft touch. I have tried, desperately at times, to find renditions of the sonatas that capture the essence of the work. This set is a veritable gold mine and a purchase you can make without fear. You will be pleased with your decision for a long time.