Father-Daughter Duo Plays Beethoven a Bit Too Straight

The program of Beethoven sonatas scheduled by distinguished veteran pianist Claude Frank and much admired violinist Pamela Frank turned out to be a more mundane affair than expected Sunday night in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

The father-daughter team was in good form, each up to any mechanical challenges this agenda--Sonatas Nos. 4 (in A minor), 10 (G major) and 9 (the “Kreutzer”)--could offer. They have performed these works together before; in 1997, they gave a Beethoven sonata cycle in Wigmore Hall in London. Their playing inhabits the style effortlessly.

Solidity, integrity and technical achievement were certainly part of the offering. What wasn’t there was vividness, spontaneous insights into the importance of this music or the feeling that any interpreters should bring to it.

Sculpted in advance rather than invented on the spot, these readings moved along steadily, but not compellingly; they laid out the material without making it seem inevitable. Creating a shared experience is the purpose of playing in public; merely to do it correctly accomplishes only part of the musician’s unspoken contract with the listener.

The performance that came closest to the ideal of sharing thoughts and emotions with the listener was that of Opus 96, the forward-thrusting G-major Sonata that seems to predict the course of music after 1812, the year of its composition. Here, Beethoven anticipates Brahms, Richard Strauss, even Ravel, in a kaleidoscopic Romantic idiom unlike his previous style. It is an inspiring document, and the duo approached its realization.

The single encore was Brahms: the slow movement of the Sonata in D minor, Opus 108.