Latest / The Piano Maven with Jed Distler / Beethoven's 32 Sonatas with 64 pianists: Op. 26 ("Funeral March")

Transcript

Beethoven's 32 Sonatas with 64 pianists: Op. 26 ("Funeral March") · The Piano Maven with Jed Distler

• 0:00
  This is Jed Dissler and welcome to the Piano Maven, your friendly podcast guide to piano
• 0:18
  recordings.
• 0:20
  And you can subscribe to this podcast through my sub stack page by clicking on the link
• 0:27
  in my episode description.
• 0:30
  Paid subscribers get all kinds of nifty bonuses such as piano geek zoom hangs.
• 0:39
  Does that sound coherent?
• 0:42
  You know you're hanging out on zoom and you're a piano geek?
• 0:45
  Yeah, of course that sounds pretty consistent because that's what it is.
• 0:50
  You also will get opportunities to chat with me and basically you get an opportunity to
• 0:58
  take more of a deep dive into piano mavenism.
• 1:03
  Did I just start a religion or a cult called piano mavenism?
• 1:08
  The truth is piano mavens have been around for centuries and you know it's a long standing
• 1:14
  cult or group or community, whatever you want to call it.
• 1:19
  I prefer to call it a community of piano mavens and the more the merrier.
• 1:23
  So please consider subscribing on sub stack to my piano maven page.
• 1:31
  So we are in the midst of a mini series within the piano maven podcast this month.
• 1:40
  We are going through all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas in numerical order, recommending two
• 1:48
  recordings of each sonata with a different pianist for each recording and not repeating
• 1:54
  one pianist.
• 1:56
  So that will be 64 pianists in all when this gets done.
• 2:03
  On this episode I'm going to be talking about the piano sonata number 12, an A flat major
• 2:09
  known as the funeral march sonata because its third movement is, you guessed it, a funeral
• 2:16
  march.
• 2:18
  And actually this sonata is interesting because not one of its four movements is in so-called
• 2:26
  sonata form.
• 2:28
  Usually your first movement of a classical sonata has a theme and then a second subject
• 2:34
  and then a development section and then the themes recapitulate.
• 2:39
  Well here, Beethoven's first movement is in the form of a theme and variations.
• 2:46
  And as far as performance is concerned, if you want variety from variation to variation
• 2:54
  in this movement more than a unifying thread, if you want spontaneity and if you want a
• 3:02
  really freewheeling open-hearted approach to the whole sonata that is far removed from
• 3:10
  the literalist zeitgeist prevailing today and actually prevailing since the 1930s and
• 3:17
  1940s under the influence of people like the pianist Arthur Schnabel, conductor Arturo
• 3:24
  Toscanini and the Budapest string quartet who all kind of created this paradigm shift
• 3:32
  in Beethoven interpretation that largely prevails today.
• 3:37
  What I'm saying is that if you want the anti-Schnabel in the Opus 26 Ab sonata, I submit for your
• 3:46
  approval or possible disapproval an historic recording made in 1930 by Mark Hamburg.
• 3:55
  Now who was Mark Hamburg?
• 3:57
  He was a Russian pianist born in 1879.
• 4:01
  He studied with Theodor Leschetinsky as did Schnabel and Petarevsky and Ignatz Friedman
• 4:08
  and thousands of others.
• 4:10
  And when Schnabel was asked about that famous quote from his teacher Leschetinsky who said
• 4:18
  to the young Schnabel, Schnabel you are not a pianist, you are a musician.
• 4:24
  Schnabel reflected on this and he said that Leschetinsky could have said the opposite
• 4:30
  of Mark Hamburg meaning that you are not a musician, you are a pianist.
• 4:35
  Meaning that Mark Hamburg had an absolutely natural and effortless facility but more often
• 4:43
  than not the facility was in the driver's seat rather than the musician so to speak.
• 4:51
  And Hamburg made many, many, many records and some of his recordings could be eloquent yet
• 4:58
  there are a lot of recordings where he goes wild and he flies all over the place helter
• 5:03
  skelter moving anywhere the wind blows.
• 5:07
  And I think once in a review I called him the Edward of the piano because he couldn't
• 5:14
  help but be bad when he was bad.
• 5:18
  Although when he was good he could be so interesting and he's always fun to listen to in a way
• 5:25
  even at his worst.
• 5:27
  But if you listen to his 1930 recording of the Beethoven funeral march sonata you hear
• 5:32
  him arpeggiate chords and break his hands playing the left hand before the right hand
• 5:39
  like a Paderewski caricature and he takes extreme speeds for the variations and he accentuates
• 5:49
  bass notes with very little subtlety and he finds all kinds of inner voices that are both
• 5:55
  real and implied.
• 5:57
  But I have to tell you that as it's often the case with Mark Hamburg he's fun to listen
• 6:03
  to and it really sounds like this pianist is improvising the music on the spot and his
• 6:10
  big tone and his feeling for color comes through the 1930 recording very beautifully and vividly.
• 6:19
  His scherzo movement is also full of crazy accentuations, it's super fast and the lines
• 6:27
  race ahead and blur and go way past the speed limit.
• 6:32
  But you know this crazy playing really does hold your attention.
• 6:37
  The funeral march under Mark Hamburg is relatively contained and steady.
• 6:42
  Here he behaves himself a little more.
• 6:45
  I mean he tapers dynamics to suit his own expressive agenda but it's all quite tasteful
• 6:51
  and like I said relatively contained.
• 6:55
  But as you might expect given that this is Mark Hamburg the toccata-like finale is really
• 7:01
  brisk but it is also shapely and it does bring out the melodic asymmetry in an almost schnoblesque
• 7:12
  kind of fashion and you are hard pressed to figure out where the bar lines occur.
• 7:18
  I do like how Mark Hamburg plays this final movement.
• 7:22
  I mean it's madcap but it's wonderfully alive and it has so much humor to it.
• 7:29
  Maybe this is Mark Hamburg's finest recorded Beethoven performance.
• 7:34
  Some of his others are erratic to say the least but I guess I'm talking way more than
• 7:41
  I should about this performance mainly because when I listened to it recently I just got
• 7:46
  so caught up in it and it gave me a lot of food for thought.
• 7:50
  So that's the historic choice for Opus 26.
• 7:55
  Now my modern recommendation for this sonata is a performance that's utterly, utterly different
• 8:02
  and it's the recording on Deutsche Grammophon by Emil Gielels.
• 8:08
  Like Mark Hamburg he also tends to be pianistically oriented and when I say that about Gielels
• 8:16
  I mean that in terms of how the phrases rise and fall and also in regard to the dynamic
• 8:26
  projection of Gielels and I've often taken this pianist to task for his clipping of detached
• 8:33
  phrases as if you're being hit by pellets from a BB gun.
• 8:38
  But this does work to his advantage in the opening variations movement and the incredible
• 8:46
  clarity of texture and overall unity that he brings to the variations has a steadiness
• 8:53
  and a structural integrity that is at the total opposite end of Mark Hamburg's improvisatory
• 9:01
  volatility.
• 9:04
  The scherzo with Emil Gielels of course is taken at a more reasonable pace.
• 9:10
  It's a little square in its phraseology I admit but every note is precisely placed and
• 9:18
  thoroughly voiced and there's only a tiny hint of relaxation in the trio but the finish
• 9:25
  of the pianism and the utter integrity of the conception in this movement really won
• 9:31
  me over even though I prefer a little lighter touch generally.
• 9:36
  Gielels is absolutely terrific in the funeral march movement and his long-range scaling
• 9:43
  of the dynamics and how he gauges the climaxes amounts to a kind of master class in how to
• 9:51
  convey and sustain a large time scale at a slow tempo.
• 9:58
  I mean Gielels could sustain slow movements like nobody's business especially in the concert
• 10:03
  hall.
• 10:04
  My favorite example of how he does that is in a live 1980 performance of the Largo from
• 10:11
  the Chopin B minor sonata where you hang on every note for dear life.
• 10:17
  I'll talk about that performance maybe in another episode.
• 10:21
  But getting back to the Beethoven, Gielels in the toccata-like finale is relatively light
• 10:28
  in articulation yet it's resolutely steady with no unwanted accents or vagaries.
• 10:37
  Now I may not always agree with Gielels aesthetically as a Beethoven player but here in the Sonata
• 10:45
  number 12 in A flat I think he realizes his conception to perfection and he compels you
• 10:52
  to listen and that says a lot.
• 10:55
  There's also a live performance with Gielels of the sonata that you can watch on YouTube
• 11:00
  and I think that complements the studio recording but I think that the studio recording is definitely
• 11:07
  a high point in his recordings of the Beethoven sonatas for Deutsche Grammophon.
• 11:13
  By the way he did not quite complete this cycle for Deutsche Grammophon.
• 11:18
  He died before he was able to record the sonatas numbers 1, 9, 11, 24, and 32.
• 11:29
  And that might be a topic for a future episode meaning the topic of pianists who almost completed
• 11:36
  yet did not manage to complete their recorded Beethoven cycles.
• 11:42
  But we are almost at the halfway mark in this little mini-series.
• 11:45
  Well it's not little, it's actually kind of big come to think of it.
• 11:50
  This mini-series is a survey of all 32 Beethoven sonatas each with two recommended recordings
• 11:58
  and without repeating a pianist.
• 12:01
  It's going to be 64 pianists in all.
• 12:04
  So I hope you've been enjoying this Beethoven journey on the Piano Maven podcast.
• 12:11
  My name is Jed Disler and please join me next time.
• 12:15
  Take good care.