Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos 8, 17 & 31

Beethoven
Piano Sonatas Nos 8, 17 & 31
Virginia Black (piano)
CRD 3544   59:03 mins

This release is perhaps aimed at a more popular market than some, as witness the liner note by the prominent Beethoven cheerleader John Suchet. He runs through all the standard clichés about Beethoven’s rule-breaking originality and the torments of his deafness, and explains why the piano sonatas are a kind of autobiography. Clearly hoping to persuade listeners to regard the composer as cool, he points out that the theme of the ‘Pathetique’s slow movement was borrowed by Billy Joel for a song on his album An innocent man, whose booklet notes include the phrase ‘words by B Joel, music by L van Beethoven’. But there’s no reason why Suchet’s suggestion that the nine-times-repeated chord in Op. 110 is a metaphor for his deafness, should not be true.

Virginia Black is a former professor of harpsichord at the Royal Academy of Music, but the piano was her first love, and she has chosen these three sonatas as an illustration of how the difficulties of Beethoven’s life and health are reflected in his music. The opening movement of the ‘Tempest’ comes in brightly martial mode, but the Adagio – which hints at profundities – gets short shrift with a briskly matter-of-fact tone, and no hint of poetry.

In the Allegro of the ‘Pathetique’, the chord at the climax of the main theme comes as a vulgarly arpeggiated thwack, and since that is repeated four times it becomes irritating. One waits in vain for any tenderness in the Adagio cantabile, but at least the Rondo romps along as it should. Black’s account of Op. 110 is perfectly decent, but without any trace of the underlying rapture, or of anguish in the Arioso dolente sections.

Too many great pianists have unlocked these works, spoiling us for anything less than excellence.

Michael Church