Beethoven’s titles were mostly supplied by publishers with the aim of maximizing sales. This sonata may be the exception: the young composer liked seeing the words Grand Sonate Pathétique on the cover. It was 1798 and he was finding a healthy following among the moneyed classes in Vienna. The sonata is dedicated to Prince Karl von Lichnowsky and shows some influence of Mozart’s sonata K457, which is in the same key, C minor. The middle movement is literally child’s play. It’s one of the first things your piano teacher puts on the stand as homework.
Intelligent listening begins with Glenn Gould, and may well end there. Gould tries to tease out hidden meanings in Beethoven, not all of them evident to the human eye and ear. In his hands the sonata is not so much deceptively simple as comprehensively deceptive. The finale goes way off the metronome into a realm of excitement all its own.
The eccectric Austrian iconoclast Friedrich Gulda is so slow in the middle movement he’s almost static. Gulda’s personality, though, is hypnotic. You, too, don’t move while he plays. Of his three recordings, this is the one to try.
Idagio lists 133 recordings of this sonata, going way back to Frederick Lamond and Wilhelm Backhaus in 1926-7. Arthur Schnabel is the first to command attention: masterly, unemotional, subversively witty in unexpected places. No-one goes very far in this sonata without first hearing Schnabel, who offers lavish encouragement to the amateur in flourishes of wrong notes.
Edwin Fischer, in 1938, exemplifies a quieter authority – a technical agility that allows him to accomplish anything at high speed without appearing flashy, allied to a lively mind that drives the argument off the beaten track.
The Pathétique was a favourite of Arthur Rubinstein’s; his earliest take, dated 1946, wears a smiley face.
From then on, practically every person with a full set of fingers has given the Pathetique a go. The complete cyclists who record the full set of 32 tend to give it less individual attention than the more daunting sonatas. I’m ruling out Kempff, Arrau, Brendel, Ashkenazy, Barenboim, Jeno Jando, Bishop-Kovacevich, Buchbinder, Pollini, Levit, though each has merits.
Two that particularly catch my ear are the Austrian scholar Paul Badura-Skoda, who plays in 1953 with a sense of discovery as if the whole of music flows from this remarkable work, and the Argentine Ingrid Fliter whose touch in the middle movement is daringly dreamy.
I turned to my friend Amir Mandel, chief critic of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, whose favourites include Emil Gilels (romantic and powerful), Richard Goode (restrained yet very moving), Artur Rubinstein( aristocratic, non-sentimental, beautiful) and Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (great touch; great structure). The last is a real surprise – recklessly fast, yet constantly revealing.
Final call? Gould, Gulda, Fischer, Fliter, Bavouzet.
The Israel Philharmonic took the unusual – possibly unprecedented – step of organising a concert on Friday night, traditionally the day of rest for the Jewish people.
The concert was a recital for four-hand piano by Martha Argerich, who is presently in residence with the orchestra, and its incoming music director Lahav Shani.
The recital began at 9pm at Heichal Hatarbut, home of the Israel Philharmonic.
It included Prokofiev’s first symphony, arranged for four hands.
The encores included selections from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite by Tchaikovsky and Khachaturian’s Masquerade.
As a representative state-funded institution with a number of religiously observant employees, the Israel Phil has a general rule of avoiding performances on rest days and holy days.
We regret to share news of the death of Emanuel Borok, concertmaster of the Moscow Philharmonic 1971-3, of the Israel Chamber Ensemble 1973-4, of the Boston Pops 1974-85 and enduringly of the Dallas Symphony, 1985-2010.
Manny was 75 and had been ill for the past year.
His daughter Sarah has posted: January 4th, 1:48am, 2020, my dad, Emanuel Borok, passed away, surrounded by his children and wife. Details on memorial service in Dallas, TX will follow soon. Please feel free to share memories, or any feelings on this post. Rest in Peace, Pap. You are larger than life, and I love you so very very much.
Manny with his wife a year ago
A superb musician, generous with his knowledge and his time, Manny was often in touch with Slipped Disc with wry observations on the state of the music world. He was a good man who will be greatly missed.
The cellist Margarita Balanas has made an absorbing first film of love and loss, based on a solo work by the composer Peteris Vasks.
Of the nine Beethoven symphonies, the second and the eighth are the least performed. The low profile of the second is understandable: it is no great advance on the breakthrough first symphony. The eighth has another problem. It succeeds the furies of the seventh symphony by regressing almost all the way back to Haydn-like purities. Its lightness and simple form are, however, deceptive.
The year is 1812. Napoleon is charging into Russia, slaughtering thousands in his mission to bring the whole of Europe under French rule. Beethoven begins his eighth symphony in a vacuum of anxiety. By the time he finishes, Napoleon is in full retreat and there are ominous bangs and crashes in the finale. On first hearing, in February 1814, the symphony was declared a flop. This may have been down to Beethoven’s bad conducting – the orchestra took its beat from the concertmaster – or to its indeterminate agenda. Beethoven referred to it confusingly as his ‘little Symphony in F’, a nod to the Pastoral Symphony with which it shares a key. He considered it a superior work to the seventh symphony, without explaining why. At 26 minutes it is unwieldy – too long to fit in the first half of a concert and too short for the main course. It is an oddbod, a misfit, an orphan. Conductors have the choice of either looking back to Haydn or ahead to the unheralded glories of the immortal Ninth.
In the earliest known recording, from Berlin in 1924, Otto Klemperer takes the second option, loading the symphony with excess portent. Klemperer would record the symphony three times more, getting ever heavier though not without reason. There is always logic in his doctrine and the climax is never less than conclusive. A modern echo can be heard in Daniel Barenboim’s muscular, sententious 2000 reading with the same Berlin Staatskapelle orchestra, beautifully played.
The opposite extreme would be the head-over-heels onrush of the period-instrument ensembles, most propulsive of them John Eliot Gardiner’s ORR and Franz Brüggen’s Orchestra of the 18th Century, smashing Beethoven’s speed limits in a bid to make some scholarly point or another. Some find this irresistibly exciting. Myself, I would turn to Toscanini if sheer excitement is the order of the day.
The prime alternative to Klemperer’s deliberation and Gardiner’s speed trap is Wilhelm Furtwängler, who left four recordings, full of lightness, wit and invitations to the dance. In the second movement he is irresistible, imitating either Maelzel’s newfangled metronome or Haydn’s Clock Symphony with a sneaky wink that belies his absolute mastery of time. His 1954 Vienna Philharmonic performance at the Salzburg Festival, three months before he died, is monumental.
Christian Thielemann with the Vienna Philharmonic in 2011 captures something of the same ease of movement, an approach that feels organic rather than intellectualized.
There are, altogether, 114 recordings of the 8th symphony on Idagio of which I have listened to at least two-thirds, relying on an international panel of friends with trusted taste to make sure I have missed nothing of moment. Such as Erich Leinsdorf’s Boston breezer of 1969, a full minute faster than the norm and with a filigree internal balancing of winds, strings and (especially) percussion that improves greatly on the Klemperer sound while pursuing hidden depths.
George Szell with his Clevelanders are likewise exemplary. Only Mariss Jansons with his Munich orchestra, recorded in Tokyo in 2012, achieves a more perfect sound picture, outstandingly so in the finale.
Others I would urgently recommend are Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1991), Riccardo Chailly (2011) and Philippe Jordan (2017), each adding sparkle to the proceedings. Leonard Bernstein is not to be ignored, nor is Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, who I will discuss in greater detail elsewhere in this survey. Simon Rattle and David Zinman hold the middle ground between modern and period practice. Never underestimate Neville Marriner or Rafael Kubelik.
My Spectator colleague Richard Bratby advocates Charles Mackerras with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra: ‘I was at the recording session, the last in the cycle. Sir Charles was ill; I picked up his prescription and helped him down to the station with his luggage afterwards. Maybe that’s the only reason why I love this one but the warmth and romantic beauty of the 3rd movement Trio moved me deeply – I remember the horn section crowding into the playback room (the lovely old art deco Green Room at the Phil, now demolished) and watching the smiles spread across their faces as they listened).’ Sadly, it’s not on Idagio yet.
Final choice? Harnoncourt, Jansons, Leinsdorf, Furtwängler, Klaus Tennstedt. Just listen here at https://www.idagio.com
Would you believe there are academics out there who want to get rid of Beethoven?
