Review: Andras Schiff concludes Beethoven sonata cycle in Disney
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András Schiff’s cycle of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas, which ended Wednesday night, has now entered the annals of Walt Disney Concert Hall. The building is young, but it is already a practiced host to and an inspiration for greatness. Beethoven sonata cycles are occasions, but they don’t always make history. This one did.
The Hungarian pianist played his cycle over 18 months in four pairs of concerts, fall and spring. An eight-volume recorded cycle on ECM has been released on roughly the same schedule. “I have always thought of Beethoven’s 32 pianos sonatas as a vast mountain-range, like the Himalayas,” Schiff writes in the last disc of his set containing the sonatas with the opus numbers, 109, 110 and 111, which he played on Wednesday.
As a Beethovenian mountaineer, Schiff overcame obstacles with assurance. His balance was unshakable. Beethoven wrote nothing this pianist’s fingers couldn’t negotiate with grace and force. He climbed not only as athlete but also as poet and scientist. He had microscope in hand to savor details. He had with him the highest-pixel camera on the market with the best wide-range lens, and he knew how to use it for capturing a sweeping landscape.
When the peaks were high and the terrain rough, he raced up cliffs like Spider-Man, without stopping for oxygen. When the atmosphere became too rarefied for human lungs, as it did in the last three sonatas Wednesday, Schiff did not become lightheaded. But he did levitate.
And yet, this cycle was less a physical journey than a growing process. The landscape didn’t change as much as the listener’s psyche. None of us -- and that includes Schiff -- were the same person before and after.
At the start, in fall 2007, a modest, formal, professorial pianist came onstage and began with playful music meant to wow conventional 18th century aristocrats. By the time he reached the last three sonatas, Beethoven had risen above convention with every note.
Schiff retained the old sonata forms and fugue, but not Papa Haydn’s sonata forms, not Papa Bach’s fugues. Opus 109 and Opus 111 end in variation movements. The themes are terra firm, the final pages end elsewhere. In the last sonata, a deaf composer abandons the rules of music for the call of magical bells. Sound for Beethoven had become a vision.
The experiences of hearing Schiff in Disney and on CD are radically different. The recordings are luminous. Although they were recorded live in Zurich, Switzerland, they reveal a kind of preserved freshness. An ideal piano dances in imaginary space. Everything in Beethoven can be heard, savored, adored. I recommend them without qualification.
But on stage, in a hall like Disney that is large but has an acoustical immediacy, the physical presence of Schiff’s Beethoven was overpowering. His concentration is intense and it creates an atmosphere of some tension. He could dream at the keyboard but also play as if possessed. He keeps his emotional distance from the audience and never loses his staggering technical control. But as he delves deeply into every aspect of Beethoven, he assumes the role of spiritual guide.
On Wednesday, Schiff played the three sonatas practically as one 70-minute composition, with only a quick bow between them. He began the lyrical opening of Opus 109 like an ardent lover picking up from where he had left off the evening before, without so much as a hello.
In Opus 110, he went through passages of dark and light as matters of life and death. But Opus 111 was the sonata in which Schiff became possessed. The first movement was ferocious. The second, and last, movement is where Beethoven most radically broke down the barriers between harmony and timbre, between organization and anarchy, between music and sound.
Here Schiff played in a transfixed state. He radiantly floated the deceptively temperate arietta, on which the variations are based, in Disney’s sweet acoustics. He let the early variations gently sway. A classicist, he refused to jazz up the jazzy third variation.
But he did not resist Beethoven’s loosening the ground under his feet. Gradually did he let body and mind fuse. It felt to me as though Schiff was calmly leading us from one world to the next. Those trills, almost impossible to master, sounded effortless.
Concert halls are the sum of the vibrations made by the artists who inhabit them. Schiff’s trills have surely changed, in some unknowably subtle way, the molecular structure of Disney Hall. Meanwhile National Public Radio streamed Wednesday’s concert live and it remains archived in cyberspace. And we have the CDs and they will be around for as long as people care about this music.
--Mark Swed
