Next season at the Barbican, Murray Perahia will devote himself to Beethoven, playing all five piano concertos with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, as well as giving a solo recital devoted to the composer. The main work in his latest appearance was by Beethoven, too – the biggest of all the piano sonatas, the Hammerklavier Op 106.
When Perahia is at his best, one can only wonder at the polish and luminous beauty of his playing, even when some of his interpretative details are less convincing. But this never became one of those occasions. As if to counteract the major-key assertiveness of the Hammerklavier to follow, the first half had been made up of works in which minor keys and introspection predominated. Haydn’s F minor Variations sounded as wistfully Schubertian as ever, but the performance of Mozart’s A minor Sonata K 310 was a fierce, almost intimidating exercise in Sturm und Drang, and Brahms’ final set of piano pieces, Op 119, never evoked the confessional intimacy they can in the early numbers, or became convincingly affirmative in the final rhapsody, which sometimes seemed to take Perahia out of his technical comfort zone, too.
Technique was never an issue in the Hammerklavier, a considerable feat in itself, but the performance remained disengaged, distanced. There was no sense of mounting intensity as each strophe of the great Adagio unfolded, and lots of clarity but no real excitement even in the final fugue. It was a performance to be admired rather than to find genuinely thrilling.
