Kolja Lessing, one of the most versatile musicians of our time, has energized music culture with significant impulses as a violinist and pianist who combines interpretive and scholarly work. For cpo he has now recorded two violin sonatas by Carl Czerny. After producing several violin and piano sonatas Czerny wrote his grand Sonata Concertante in four movements in 1848, the year of the failed revolution. The contrast to his first Violin Sonata of 1807, a work of his youth, could hardly be greater: reconsideration of Mozartian rhetoric and compositional technique mark this work pulsing with astonishing kinetic energy and with a concertante character for the most part embodied by the piano, while the violin part instead is assigned more the role of brilliant commentary or pointed interaction. Kolja Lessing himself wrote the booklet text and expresses the greatest thanks to Anton Kuerti – not only for his tireless research, investigation, and revival of Czerny’s colossal oeuvre but also just as much for his meticulous transcription of what in part are Czerny’s difficult-to-decipher manuscripts into modern notation. “Accordingly, Anton Kuerti, as Czerny’s real rediscoverer, shall have the last word with a deeply felt statement about these treasures that have now been unearthed: It is a rare privilege to find music that has been so inexcusably neglected and now brought back to life.”
I hope that Anton Kuerti's 2003 remakes of Beethoven's last three sonatas will spur him on to re-record the other 29, for these new versions are infinitely superior to his 1974/75 recordings. The pianist remains thoroughly devoted to microscopic detail and grand clarification, but his compulsive drive and raspy surface style have considerably mellowed, while his soft playing has gained body and luminescence. To sample Kuerti's newly found serenity and flow in this music, listen to his spacious parsing of Op. 109's rhapsodic introductory movement and to his patiently unfolding trills in that sonata's third movement variations and in Op. 111's Arietta, and notice how he builds Op. 110's long-lined Adagio ma non troppo from the bottom up. His rubatos in the latter sonata's Fugue no longer seem artificially tacked on but rather are organically integrated into the music's visionary path. His basic measured tempos for Op. 111, once static and fussy, now emerge as all of one piece. It goes without saying that these works are amply served via recordings from Schnabel to Serkin and Kempff to Kempf, with Hungerford, Goode, Pollini, and Richter for good measure. To this august roster we easily can add the veteran Kuerti. [4/6/2004] --Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com
