Beethoven Sonatas Redux

There are many reasons why only a handful of pianists have recorded the thirty-two Beethoven sonatas more than once. When Audio High President Michael Silver invited me to perform and record the complete cycle at Le Petit Trianon in San Jose, I was flattered. Nonetheless, the decision to accept the recording aspect of that invitation was not made lightly.

At the back of my mind lay a fundamental premise that there is no point in making a second recording of anything, let alone an entire Beethoven cycle, unless it reflects further thought and greater insight on the artist’s part. Moreover, to pretend that an undertaking of this scope is anything other than gruelling is pointless. Let’s face it, technique and stamina do not generally improve when one is a pensioner. Neither does memory. So why on earth did I grab at the bait?

There are technological reasons for having another go at the sonatas: I first recorded them in 2000 for a now out-of-print Juno-shortlisted 10-CD album. The piano was a reproducing Boesendorfer 290SE, a marvel of its time, so fiendishly expensive that only 32 were made (one for each Beethoven sonata, apparently). It was situated in a spacious living room, which gave the sound an undeniable intimacy – far closer (for better or worse) to the sound of a large drawing room in Beethoven's era than that of a resonant, modern concert Steinway in a large concert hall.

Still, again for better or worse, a resonant, modern concert Steinway in a large concert hall is what most people have become accustomed to for the past century and a half. Having been a Steinway artist by choice for decades, the opportunity to re-record these sonatas in ideal concert-hall conditions proved irresistible.

When I started working on the sonatas in the late 1990s, over two dozen of them were new to my fingers, if not my brain. I performed the cycle eight times in several locales, including Washington, Vancouver, Seattle, and Toronto.  This undoubtedly was the artistic journey of my life. No project I had ever undertaken had been remotely so exhilarating: my brain was flooded daily with insights about how Beethoven's mind worked, how his music was put together, and how his magnificent, multi-faceted thoughts might be transmogrified from notes on a page into a rich, architecturally-coherent sonic image.  Delving deeply into Beethoven's creativity for over two years was exhausting but exhilarating. Richard Goode told me my life would never be the same afterward, and he was right. This adventure was not a mere culmination but a rejuvenation. To this day, I still study scores and practice in ways I had not previously done. New ideas about interpretation, technique, musical structure, and sound production constantly occur to me whenever I sit at the keyboard (and often when I am away from it).

Several sonatas from the early set still rank among my favourite of all the recordings I have made. However, I hear most of them differently. In retrospect, the first set constitutes a record of how I then thought they should be played. This time I intended the forthcoming cycle to represent a more personal interpretation of the sonatas while still revealing more of his mind than mine.

Initially, I experimented with self-conscious changes in interpretation: stretching tempos here, pushing them elsewhere, discovering and bringing out voices that Beethoven himself may not have known were present, playing lyrical themes more "romantically,” and so forth. It took only a couple of hours before I realized that I was doing things my teachers would never have allowed me to do, things I had never previously done, and things I never permitted my students to do. Some extraordinary performers like Vladimir Horowitz and Glenn Gould could successfully impose their will on a composer’s score, but I have never been able to or wanted to, do so.

Although I'd always had a healthy, robust sound, by the turn of the twenty-first century, I realized that a wider tonal variety might add a beneficial dimension to my performances. I began to work consciously toward that end, experimenting with various touches and different ways of positioning the hand and fingers. I also studied the orchestral sonorities achieved by great conductors of the past, especially Furtwängler, both Kleibers and Levine.

A characteristic of my early playing was to “over-punctuate” the music. Commas in the score tended to be treated as semi-colons; semi-colons became periods, and so on.  By the time I’d made the first set, I’d long eliminated most of those mannerisms. Still, when working on the sonatas the second time, I was amazed at the degree to which I found myself not simply choosing to sustain the music throughout each section but being forced by the music itself to do so.  Events that may once have seemed local now appeared more structural, and this seemed to add more conviction to the interpretation.

It never ceases to amaze me that our minds can store everything in some deep recess of our memory. We apparently practice every piece we’ve learned unconsciously, non-stop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Why else, then, are passages that scared the bejeezus out of me 15 years earlier more comfortable in the hands of a 72-year-old than those in his late 50s? Why did solutions to interpretative problems in a given work now appear far more easily and quickly solved than before? Most puzzling is that the sonatas that changed the most are the ones I had performed most frequently over my career.

So, I agreed to Michael’s proposal, provided a) retakes could be scheduled for the next day so as to eliminate the most egregious missteps but not would be over-edited to the point where the performances would lose their live quality. Also, I insisted on having the final say over which pieces would be released; the deciding factor would be that those performances would be pianistically equal to the previous set and would interpretively traverse different paths I took the first time. The deal was struck; twenty-four of them ultimately made the cut.

So, is this set better than the first? That’s for each listener to decide, although I believe it is. Certainly, these performances are palpably different, and for better or worse, they reflect my revised thinking at the time about these crucially seminal works.  As for the sound of the recordings, with a beautiful Steinway and a hall with excellent acoustics and no standing waves to worry about, there is no contest.