When I was young, there were three pianists whom I always hoped to be able to hear in person, Rudolf Serkin, Vladimir Horowitz, and Arthur Rubenstein. I finally heard all three, Horowitz only once. These were, of course, the most high-profile pianists living in the United States in the post-WW II years, and all three had prominent recording contracts to keep their names available.

I don’t suppose I have heard these (1962–63) recordings for 30 or more years, and revisiting old pleasures can be a disappointing experience. My youthful enthusiasm anointed Serkin as the ultimate keeper of Beethoven’s flame and relegated Rubinstein to the category of a good show. Time and experience tempered these judgments, as they must, and hearing Rubinstein live several times certainly gave nuance to what a “good show” ought to be. I think what finally did it was letting myself hear Rubinstein’s astonishing sense of line and delicacy of touch, which drew rather than propelled us through even the well-known bars of the “Moonlight” Sonata. I have always admired the way his playing makes each note suggest there is an obvious following one that will appear in its due course. Above all, in his playing there is the sense of the sheer pleasure he takes in it. By this I do not mean he is self-indulgent or willful or careless. On the contrary. Though I recall him as a good showman and though there was the occasional fluff, I always had the sense that when he sat down at the piano, Beethoven came first.

The sonatas here are the “warhorses” of the repertoire, of course, and there is good reason for that: they are sturdy stuff. But how many actually play the triplets of the first movement of No. 14 “with a most delicate touch,” as Beethoven asks of the whole movement, and make them go somewhere? How many can? Rubinstein does so and uses that to create an urgency only released by the arrival of the tune in m. 10, a melody, in turn, urged toward its resolution in m. 22. What sets Rubinstein apart for me is that he does this not by driving us through the music but by drawing us along with it: this is not Bach à la Beethoven. This is not to say that Rubinstein is all delicacy: subtlety need not be understated, nor passion overplayed. There is fire enough when called for, as in the last movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata, for example. In 29/6, James Reel called this playing “poetic,” and we have need of such poetry today.

FANFARE: Alan Swanson Reviewing earlier release

All of the positive attention and high praise that 26-year-old pianist Igor Levit has garnered in Europe is thoroughly justified by his Sony Classical debut release encompassing Beethoven’s last five sonatas. Levit’s affinity for the composer’s essentially linear style and intense expressivity borders on clairvoyance, if you’ll forgive the cliché. You notice this immediately in Op. 101’s first and third movements, where thoughtful voice leading and flexible lyricism mesh into a single entity. Impressive pianistic poise and thoughtful dynamic scaling give clarity and meaning to the Scherzo’s obsessive march rhythms and difficult register leaps as well as to the Fugue’s knotty textures.

Levit takes the “Hammerklavier” first-movement Allegro at a tempo close to the composer’s admittedly optimistic metronome marking, yet the music ebbs and flows with characterful assurance. The Scherzo also takes bracing wing; it features biting cross-rhythmic accents and a ferocious ascending F major scale from bottom to top. You might describe Levit’s masterful Adagio sostenuto as a fusion of Rudolf Serkin’s classical reserve and Claudio Arrau’s depth of tone and vocally oriented inflection. In the finale’s introductory Largo, Levit piles into the jazzy broken-chord accelerando with shattering abandon, and brings plenty of drama, dynamic contrast, and varied articulations to the fugue.

Following Op. 109’s eloquently shaped Vivace, Levit’s well sprung and sharply detailed second movement is one of the few on disc to make Beethoven’s detached and legato phrasings audible to the point where the music sounds faster than it actually is performed. Levit’s heartfelt, beautifully sung out, and assiduously unified third-movement variations easily measure up to the catalog’s finest versions. Op. 110 also stands out for Levit’s brilliant synthesis of personal poetry and scrupulous detail, while Op. 111 matches Mauruzio Pollini’s extraordinary exactitude (the first movement’s driving 16th-note sequences impeccably in place, the Arietta’s dotted rhythms’ spot-on accuracy and inner “swing”) with an extra hint of cantabile warmth. In short, this is Beethoven playing of the highest distinction, not to be missed.

-- Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

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This is a notable debut recording. Thanks to Igor Levit’s remarkably even touch and precise rhythmic control, the scores’ details, minutely realized, are fashioned into lucid, structurally sound interpretations. This isn’t a pianist trying to outdo others with speed, volume, or extreme interpretations, but a musician whose tasteful instincts produce Beethoven performances with purity of expression and a certain reserve.


Most striking is the gentle songfulness that Levit brings to lyrical movements, such as the brief Allegretto —an endless melody in four-part texture, singled out by more than a few people, Glenn Gould included, as their favorite movement in all of Beethoven’s sonatas—that opens the 28th Sonata, op. 101. In it, Levit succeeds at creating natural phrase divisions without breaking long lines, something that sounds easy when it’s done this well. (Anyone who has tried to play it knows how extremely difficult this is, and how disjointed the movement can sound.) The Sonata’s technically punishing second movement’s dotted rhythms and rests are perfectly executed at an unrushed tempo, and in the final movement, Levit’s comic timing and articulation rivals the very best versions of the Sonata, such as Richard Goode’s.


A generation ago, one often made allowances in performances of the “Hammerklavier,” except perhaps for Pollini, for broader than ideal tempos in the first movement to accommodate technical difficulties, or moments of stressful scrambling to get through the fugue. Judging by some recent recordings of the work—by the excellent Van Cliburn Competition medalist Sean Chen, Mari Kodama (see Jerry Dubins’s review in Fanfare 37:3), and now Igor Levit—there are clear signs that pianists’ technique in the 21st century has caught up with the Sonata’s demands. Levit’s Apollonian reading is more fluent and less heaven-storming than most. This is a young man’s “Hammerklavier,” and I wouldn’t be surprised if he were to infuse the first and third movements with more drama, through the taking of time, later in his life. He plays the first movement at 132 to the quarter in a tempo that sounds just right—Beethoven’s metronome marking, once considered impossible to realize, is 138— achieving a kind of ecstatic swing whose confident steadiness and occasional lightness doesn’t diminish the music’s profundity. The slow movement, taken exactly at Beethoven’s metronome marking of 92, is gentler than many performances, less grandly soul-searching, but serious and intimate.


In the last three sonatas, I find Levit even better than Paul Lewis, whose well-considered performances sound merely like good piano playing compared to the poised, unearthly effect—I’m thinking here of the final movements of Nos. 30 and 32, in particular—that Levit achieves with his finer technical control. The highlights here are, once again, the lyrical movements, though op. 109’s Presstissimo second movement goes like quicksilver, and op. 110’s Allegro molto is a suitably brusque interruption of the work’s otherwise exalted proceedings. In the final pages of op. 110—the triumphant return of a fugue that has been interrupted and turned around by a grief-stricken lament—I find Levit’s tempo too fast, its fluency too easily achieved. I prefer Mitsuko Uchida’s more measured realization of these tricky tempo relationships.


In the Maestoso introduction to the 32nd Sonata, op. 111, Levit’s strict dotted rhythms reveal the music’s kinship to a French overture and provide continuity, unlike Andrew Rangell’s, whose freer concept of the rhythm bogs the music down. Unlike Barenboim in his 1980s DG recording, Levit doesn’t make the slow Arietta a static dirge. His pacing allows the second movement’s sublime variations to unfold with great logic and inevitability. His interpretation of op. 111 is close to Richter’s (a 1975 performance) in its straightforward pacing, but Levit’s voicing doesn’t have Richter’s laser-like exaggeration of top lines. His right hand comes out as needed in all of these performances, but with an appealingly unforced sonority.


The Richter comparison came to mind as I watched Igor Levit on YouTube, not because the two pianists’ playing is particularly similar, but because of their shared Russian-German background, and Levit’s eclectic, rather austere repertoire choices. Both pianists’ quiet concentration conveys the sense that whatever they’re playing is of life-and-death importance, though the grim, aggressive aura that Richter sometimes projected isn’t part of Levit’s image. Levit’s videos of music by Hindemith, Reger, Beethoven (the Third Concerto), and the Bach-Brahms Chaconne arranged for left hand, show that the intensity and refinement of his Beethoven sonatas is no fluke.


Thanks are due to Sony for taking on a serious young pianist in repertoire of his choice, and providing him with sensitive engineering that showcases his full range of dynamics. There’s every indication that this recording introduces one of the 21st century’s important pianists.

FANFARE: Paul Orgel

This release combines a pair of Beethoven performances by conductor Leonard Bernstein, in his prime, with the New York Philharmonic; the Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, was recorded in 1961, and the Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92, in 1958. Both have been digitally remastered, and the earlier recording actually comes out a bit better; by 1961 Columbia's engineers had figured out how to use the backdrop of LP sound to accent orchestral strings, an effect difficult to reproduce on CD. Charismatic, gifted, and genre-crossing, Bernstein was on top of the American musical world during this period, and these recordings remained strong sellers for some years. Hearing them half a century on reminds listeners (or apprises them anew) of several things. The first is that the New York Philharmonic, though certainly more than competent, did not have a trademark strength like its chief competitors in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, and Boston. You hope for brilliance that is not there. But you're also reminded that Bernstein was a subtler conductor than he is sometimes given credit for being. His histrionic style on the podium belied a well-considered, detailed approach to these works, for which he was confronted by decades (or more) of established tradition. The Symphony No. 5 is broad rather than exceptionally violent, with a lovely free space for the oboe cadenza in the first movement; Bernstein has it expand beyond its structural significance into a moment of sudden and profound personal reflection in the midst of societal tumult. In the Symphony No. 7 Bernstein is deliberate and persistent in the first movement's slow introduction and never really turns up the voltage until the finale, which thus acquires its proper bacchanalian mood. As with other albums in this Sony reissue series, the CD version includes both photographic reproductions of the original artwork and booklet reprints of the jacket text, with added French and German translations.

-- James Manheim, AllMusic.com

...This is vibrant and virile music making full of passionate sweep, arresting clarity, and genuine, chamber-like give and take between soloist and orchestra.

Like his teacher and mentor Artur Schnabel, Fleisher underlines Beethoven's harmonic tension by either distending or slightly speeding up certain runs and arpeggiated sequences, yet rarely at the expense of accuracy...although he's not one to slave over making every long trill perfectly even and tapered. Under George Szell's eagle-eye, the Cleveland Orchestra members achieve staggering unanimity in regard to articulation and marcato phrasing, but with more heart and singing impulse than in Szell's relatively stiffer Beethoven accompaniments for Emil Gilels eight years later...

--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com [reviewing the Third Concerto, Sony 78767]

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s landmark series of Beethoven’s complete sonatas is now available as a complete set and at a very special price. Bavouzet has taken this programme to the most prestigious venues around the world and continues to perform it. Gramophone has nominated him several times for its Artist of the Year award, arguing that ‘Bavouzet’s chronological journey through the Beethoven sonatas has not been surpassed in the last 30 years. Yes, it’s that good.” Repackaged as a box of nine individual albums, and each including the original booklets with their usual personal ‘performer’s note,’ this is a must have.

Past praise of previously released sets that make up this complete edition:

Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Vol. 2

His lean, pinpointed sonority, rhythmic directness, freedom from mannerisms, and strong linear awareness convey both a strong sense of classical style and expressive economy. Bavouzet’s dynamic range is not particularly large, yet his subtle variety of articulations, thoughtful accentuation, and very discreet use of the sustain pedal give the playing a distinctive profile that recalls other intimate, Apollonian Beethoven stylists like Wilhelm Kempff, Walter Gieseking, and Robert Casadesus.

– ClassicsToday.com

Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Vol. 3

The meticulous workmanship and musical intelligence informing Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s previous Beethoven cycle installment are equally apparent throughout this third and final volume. Many pianists would be happy to claim Bavouzet’s authority and mastery

– ClassicsToday.com