Paul Lewis on the cover of the original recording of his Beethoven sonata performances (from the Amazon.com Web page for this recording)
This past November harmonia mundi got the jump on the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven by re-releasing fourteen CDs of performances by pianist Paul Lewis as a box set. The original releases date back from when I was just beginning to write for Examiner.com; and, as a result, I never really had an opportunity to encounter them. (I would later compensate by going after every recording that Lewis made of the piano music of Franz Schubert.) I thus regarded the release of this box set as a way to compensate for having missed the boat when the recordings were originally distributed.
The entire box is in three decidedly unequal sections. The first ten CDs are devoted to all of the published piano sonatas. I include the adjective “published” because the recording project chose to overlook WoO 57, the original movement of the Opus 53 (“Waldstein”) sonata in C major, now known as the “Andante favori” (favored Andante). There follow three CDs to account for the five piano concertos, the third of which consists only of the Opus 73 (“Emperor”) concerto in E-flat major, making it rather skimpy in content. (At least one other label decided to compensate by including the Opus 80 “Choral Fantasy;” but I am not going to bemoan its absence!) The final CD is devoted entirely to the Opus 120 set of 33 variations on Anton Diabelli’s waltz. I feel that the fairest way to approach this reissue is in terms of these three sections, however uneven they may be. Thus, the remainder of this article will be devoted to the sonatas.
I am sure that I am far from the only serious listener that has accumulated more than one collection of all of the sonatas. However, I also had the good fortune to listen to all of the concert programs that András Schiff prepared for his traversal of that collection. Sadly, I was only in a position to write about the last of them, devoted to Opus 109 in E major, Opus 110 in A-flat major, and Opus 111 in C minor, which also happens to be the tenth of the ten CDs in the Lewis collection. There are any number of other pianists, both present and past, that have prepared similar recitals, treating these three sonatas as an integrated set (or, what Michael Steinberg called, a “triptych”).
There is a tendency among many listeners to give precedence to what they view as the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) sonatas and the ways in which they make a daring break from the conventions of the late eighteenth century. Ironically, Sturm und Drang was primarily a literary movement that flourished during the second half of that eighteenth century. The composer that came closest to the literary origins was Joseph Haydn. Some of those ventures were decidedly impressive, but it did not take the Esterházy family long to grow impatient with Haydn’s ventures.
However, those that indulge in Beethoven’s “dramatic storms” tend to overlook the broad capacity of his sense of humor. I would argue that, while Beethoven may not have been a particularly cooperative student when taking lessons from Haydn, he came away with a perceptive account of Haydn’s technique at both ends of the scale. Thus, there is an easily-grasped sense of play in the earliest Opus 2 sonatas (all three of them), making it no surprise that Beethoven dedicated them to Haydn. As a result, while I can easily appreciate the dramatic intensity of Lewis’ interpretation of those last three sonatas, I respect him more for the cheerful lightness of touch he brings to the Opus 2 sonatas (all of which share a single CD).
That last parenthesis deserves a bit more attention. Lewis seems to have put a good deal of thought into how any single CD should be “cohabited.” When there is a set of three associated with a single opus number, as is the case with Opus 2, then they are all collected on a single CD. Sets of two are similarly grouped, but I am not always convinced by the decisions Lewis made in filling out those CDs. To some extent those who choose to listen to these performances through digital downloads may be at an advantage by having the ability to create their own playlists for what seem to be appropriate ways to group the sonatas. I wonder how may serious Beethoven listeners chose to do this when these ten CDs were first released in 2009!
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