Jonathan Biss’s survey of Beethoven’s piano sonatas is one of the threads running through the Wigmore Hall’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth. The series of seven recitals, which ends next June, seems to adopt a pick’n’mix approach to programming. Yet the opening instalment did begin at the beginning, with Beethoven’s first sonata, Op 2, No 1 in F minor, and confined itself to works from the first decade of his sonata-composing career.
It was not, however, a propitious start. Biss has been working his way through the Beethoven sonatas on disc since 2011, but his performances here were unrecognisable from the lithe, crisply articulated playing on those releases. There was an aggressive edge to almost everything; the sound was shallow and strident, the dynamic level unvaryingly loud and the tempi sometimes dizzyingly fast.
Op 2, No 1 is a big-boned sonata in the sturm-und-drang key of F minor, composed by an angry young man out to make his mark, so a degree of fierceness was perhaps forgivable. But it was less appropriate in the modest E major Sonata, Op 14, No 1, or the E flat Sonata that is the first of the Op 27 marked by Beethoven as “quasi una fantasia”, both of which were given the same treatment. Speeds in all three works were often too fast for comfort, so that wrong notes abounded and phrases became garbled or simply petered out, with over-pedalling adding to the confusion.
One feared for the two sonatas to come after the interval, but things seemed to improve with a performance of the A flat major Sonata, Op 26, which had more of the poise and clarity one expected, though there was still no genuinely quiet playing. And the Waldstein Sonata, Op 53 in C major ended the recital much as it began, with many passages pushed so aggressively they lost all coherence. Listening to one of the most magical works in the whole piano repertory became an endurance test.
• The next recital in the series is at Wigmore Hall, London, on 19 December.
