Customer Reviews

Clementi: Piano Sonatas Opp. 34,41 & 50

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2 star:		(1)
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This debut CD by Ms. Bannister brings Clementi to life with beautiful and intelligent playing. Thinking that he was a decent composer, I always subscribed to the conventional wisdom that Clementi paled in comparison to Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart. Shame on me for accepting conventional wisdom! These three sonatas show a great deal of variation in mood, form, color, and pianism, and sound fresh and exciting after multiple hearings. Much credit is due to Ms. Bannister, who clearly demonstrates a thorough understanding of the pieces and brings to light all the details that one might otherwise gloss over. Clementi was a keyboard virtuoso, so good that Mozart admitted to being jealous of his technique (at the keyboard, not compositional!). His sonatas present more than a few moments of technical complexity, and Ms. Bannister handles them with grace and ease. Listen in particular to her double thirds in the last movement of the E-flat sonata. She is also able to bring clarity to very complex forms, in particular the slow movement of the A Major sonata. This movement is like late Beethoven in the way it alternates Classical and contrapuntal materials, and veers dangerously close to being just plain weird, but Ms. Bannnister's grasp of form and line make beautiful sense of the whole. I heartily recommend this disc.

To those of us who played the little Clementi piano sonatinas when we were students, there remains the sense that his output was simple music for simple souls. But of course those were pieces written especially for students and have nothing to do with his 'grown-up' pieces, of which these three sonatas are a marvelous sampling. All three of the sonatas have depth and craft, as well as being unfailingly tuneful and interesting to the listener. I was particularly impressed with Op. 34, No. 2 with its slow opening that would have been worthy of Beethoven and its deeply felt Adagio middle movement. And I also very much liked Op. 50, No. 1, which comes from the set that contains Clementi's most famous sonata, the 'Didone abbandonata', which is No. 3 in the set. But this first sonata of Op. 50 is just as romantic in tone and dramatic in impact.

I did not respond quite so strongly to the third sonata presented here, the Op. 41 in E Flat Major. It seems almost from a different, earlier world or at least one that is a bit more lightweight. It is, in its own way, quite delightful, just not as emotionally stirring.

The pianist on the disc is a young prizewinner, Tanya Bannister, a native of Hong Kong who studied in Hong Kong, with Sequeira Cost, and at the London Royal Academy of Music and at Yale where she studied with one of my favorite pianists, Claude Frank. From the look of things she has a burgeoning concert career going, and a good thing because she is a very talented player.

Scott Morrison

I'm a big fan of Clementi sonatas, and more pianists have been wonderfully including them in the recital programs recently. This recording, while clean and well played, falls flat. I miss the vibrancy of some of the passages, the humor, the drama. This recording is good to get to know the Clementi sonatas, but this does not to full justice to the much underrated composer.