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RECITAL REVIEW
March 4, 2007
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Beethoven as Tragic Hero By Jerry Kuderna
All-Beethoven piano recitals don't come along terribly often, and for good reason. They present the greatest possible challenge to the performers and listeners, because the music itself, as Artur Schnabel put it, is "better than it can be played" — meaning that proper performances of it direct the listener toward the music rather than to the brilliance of the player.
On Sunday, Rudolf Buchbinder's Cal Performances recital located the composer in his tragic-hero guise. (Another Buchbinder concert in Berkeley, part of his projected cycle of Beethoven's 32 sonatas, was canceled when bad weather interfered with his travel plans.) Buchbinder chose works that show Beethoven's struggles as a young man, culminating in compositions that he wrote in times of crisis in the years when he was discovering his growing deafness.
In the first half of the concert, Buchbinder chose to juxtapose two tragic works from two of these sets, one composed before the onset of his deafness (Op. 10) and one after (Op. 31, from 1802). Beethoven never composed two "tragic" works in a row, so Buchbinder's decision to play these works back-to-back took courage — not because hearing them is hard on the audience, but because the emotional demands they place on him as a performer are so great.
He gave the early C-minor sonata a muscular, explosive performance that had agility and power. But the Allegro con brio first movement, while forceful enough, never generated real fire or excitement. The filing in of a large number of latecomers may have caused the following slow movement to be difficult to sustain. Its rapturous devotional mood never quite materialized (or, rather, never "dematerialized"). Its highly ornamented runs, with their peculiar enharmonic modulations, sounded aimless.
Op. 10, No. 1, ends quietly, with a whimper, so to follow it with the "Tempest" (Op. 31, No. 2), which begins softly and slowly, made for an effective transition. From a performer's point of view, the advantage to this order of playing is that you don't have to shift down, or lighten up. From a listener's point of view, we heard Buchbinder once again playing with great passion and vehemence, this time as Tragedy writ large. Despite the high drama, though, he seemed to be neglecting the dynamics on the quiet end of the scale. The "Tempest" sonata contains many silences that seem emblematic of the deep changes going on in the composer's psyche at the time.
The famous recitative passages in the first movement (marked pianissimo) were correctly played over a sustained pedal, giving an uncanny effect. Yet this was contradicted by the melody, which was played at least mezzo forte, thus completely altering the effect of an immaterial voice that Beethoven wanted. I waited in vain for one of the many pianissimos that characterize this work, which so often veers toward silence and introversion, despite its tempestuous title. The ending of the movement (also marked pianissimo) sounded perversely percussive.
Buchbinder's extroverted approach led to additional willful distortions of Beethoven's text that can be altered only at the performer's peril. The other movements also showed a curious lack of concern for the score's markings. The 32nd triplets in the slow movement, for example, were altered to plain 16ths, thereby obliterating the ominous silence that they articulate, not to mention the staccato notes that give breathless character to the finale's main theme. Buchbinder brought out some inner voices in the final movement but failed to capture its obsessive, strange, and dislocated mood. One reason for Beethoven's perennial appeal is his capacity for transforming suffering into joy. We count the Ninth Symphony and so much of his later works as supreme examples of transcendence through art. His last three sonatas, though published separately, form the last triptych and deliver a final summing up of his contribution to the art of the piano sonata. The last of these makes its way from tragedy and defiance to transfiguration. While we didn't glimpse much of Beethoven's joy in this recital, at least we heard one moment of transcendence (do we need more?) that points toward his ultimate victory. This occurred in the one truly lighthearted moment of the recital: the playing of the composer's only sonata in a major key, in E-flat (Op. 7), the only work on the program to be published separately. It is an extremely long work — indeed, the longest, except for the Hammerklavier. At the end, a miracle occurs when the struggle between the finale's lyrical and combative themes ceases and the work ends (or floats away) in a transport of ecstasy. Here Buchbinder showed a true pianissimo, and thereby transmitted perfectly the effect the composer wanted. His own struggle to convey Beethoven's struggle ceased and we heard two pages of gossamer lightness that said, "Life is good; have faith." The "Moonlight" Sonata brought the recital to a rousing conclusion. Buchbinder played it brilliantly and effectively, showing that even Beethoven's best-loved (though not by him) works never lose their appeal. As an encore, he offered the finale of the "Pathétique." All of this seemed superfluous, in light of the joy I felt at the end of Op. 7, which I had heard a quarter of an hour earlier; it is that which I will remember.
(Jerry Kuderna is a pianist who teaches at Diablo Valley College.)
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