‘Appassionata’ unleashed

TEN years ago, pianist Peter Serkin made a Beethoven recording that included the “Moonlight” Sonata and the “Appassionata.” Moonlight was evidently on, or in, his mind, since even the agitated and radical “Appassionata,” completed five years after its more popular companion, became otherworldly, albeit utterly controlled.

BMG waited four long years before releasing that disc and did so with little hoopla. However entrancing Serkin’s psychedelic revelations, apparently no amount of moonshine could persuade a skittish marketing department that there weren’t already too many Beethoven piano recordings.

In 2001, though, when Pierre-Laurent Aimard made his Carnegie Hall recital debut, the new-music specialist played the “Appassionata” in such an arrestingly glittery modern manner that Teldec couldn’t help but put out that breathtaking concert.

And a year later, the profound Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini finally got around to the “Appassionata” in the cycle of Beethoven’s sonatas he has been painstakingly recording over the last 30 years. The Deutsche Grammophon release includes two “Appassionata” performances, one made in the studio, one live, and in both Pollini captures the complete Beethoven with phenomenal playing that is thoughtful yet thunderous, sensuously beautiful and infinitely refined. This is one of the all-time great Beethoven piano recordings.

With these three original and significant releases, our 21st century “Appassionata” needs have been more than met. We are dealing, after all, with a beloved work, very much recorded. There has to be an “Appassionata” for every taste in CD bins almost everywhere.

But tell that to Jonathan Biss, Fazil Say, Kun-Woo Paik, Nikolai Lugansky and Freddy Kempf, all of whom are cramming those overstuffed bins with even more “Appassionatas.” Tell it to Lambert Orkis, who has outdone Pollini by putting out not two but three (!) performances of the sonata, each played on a different piano.

Tell it to Andras Schiff and Paul Lewis, both of whom have just begun taping Beethoven sonata cycles and whose “Appassionatas” will be upon us before we know it. Tell it to the Van Cliburn Competition folks in Texas; the three finalists last May had to play the sonata, and their final rounds can be downloaded off iTunes at 10 bucks a pop. Tell it to one Robert DeGaetano, who claws his way through the score on his own new vanity label CD (with a whopping $20 list price).

Who wants/needs/will buy so many new recordings of any sonata, “Appassionata” or otherwise? Can there be more than a handful of record collectors compelled to create “Appassionata” CD stacks that reach to the ceiling? Having worked my way through one such pile, I doubt it.

Stars in alignment

SO why the “Appassionata”? And why now? Have Beethoven’s notes perhaps released a deadly sonic Kool-Aid for use by record companies wanting to commit mass suicide? Might the companies be deluded by the youth angle? As a showpiece full of turbulence, Beethoven’s sonata obviously appeals to young musicians, and most of the new releases are by emerging artists using the “Appassionata” as an aural calling card.

Maybe multiculturalism is the appeal. The new recordings are by American, British, Turkish, Russian and Korean pianists who potentially bring interesting new accents or cultural insights to hard-core German-Austrian repertory.

Or could it be simply that the sonata matters, and that record companies have suddenly turned altruistic, concluding that humanity can use as many “Appassionatas” as it can get these days?

That’s the least likely explanation of all. But the sonata does matter.

Its opus number is 57, and it is the 23rd of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. Finished 200 years ago (the anniversary has played no part in the marketing of the new crop of CDs), it is solid middle-period Beethoven, which the Fifth Symphony was soon to follow. The title was the publisher’s idea, but Beethoven doesn’t seem to have objected. He thought the sonata his best until he wrote the “Hammerklavier,” Opus 106, a dozen years later. Some commentators claim that with the “Appassionata,” he was ushering in the era of German Romanticism.

From its sudden dramatic flare-ups at the beginning, the “Appassionata” does continue to sound revolutionary, especially in the hands of Serkin, Aimard and Pollini. The turbulence lets up only a little in the first movement, barely at all in the last. The variations of the central movement offer ethereal calm but not repose, what one commentator of yore, Hugo Leichtentritt, described as a “desperate glimpse into Nirvana.”

Another celebrated 20th century authority, Donald Francis Tovey, went even further. He wrote of the sonata’s blind fury, raging sensual fervors, haughty and imperious bursts of passion, staggering despair, fear-inspired stillness and Lear-like hysterica passio. And that’s just in the development section of the first movement. Leichtentritt likened the demonic last movement to “Inferno visions of Dante’s fancy.”

You might have guessed that Beethoven was not happy when he wrote the “Appassionata.” Indeed not. He had lost not just a love but the hope of love, and he was losing his hearing as well. Suicide had been on his mind.

But what is so striking about the “Appassionata” is that, despite its “heart-rending cries of distress” -- Tovey’s words -- the piece is very cautiously constructed. Beethoven could rant and rage as much as he wanted, because under it all he was very grounded, very sane. In fact, the revolutionary composer is unusually conventional here in his use of classical forms. Rather than riffing through the first-movement development, he follows the same order of themes -- stormy, then lyrical -- as in the opening.

Or at least he tries to. Eventually, he can’t seem to concentrate, and the piano floats into the ether. Then he once more gets a grip and offers an unusually literal recapitulation. He loses it again in a wild-man’s coda -- but one that is also, under it all, another formal reprise.

The challenge for the pianist, beyond playing the fast passages or glimpsing Nirvana in the middle movement, is to make everything fit together without its sounding as though it fits together. The metaphor of an emotional roller coaster may be a cliche, but not if you think about the tracks as much as the queasy sensations a thrill ride evokes. A roller coaster is satisfying rather than traumatic because you have faith in those tracks. Serkin, Aimard and Pollini each find a unique way to lean far over the precipice, since there is never any question of their falling.

Left to interpretation

THE new recordings by younger, less experienced players tend more toward recklessness or prudence. The daredevil Turkish pianist Say, whose CD includes two other tempestuous Beethoven sonatas (the “Waldstein” and the “Storm”), catapults through the “Appassionata,” often rushing or landing hard on accents. At the other extreme, Biss offers respectful Beethoven, no chances taken.

Kempf -- who gives us the familiar trilogy “Pathetique,” “Moonlight” and “Appassionata” -- is a poetic player with a velvety tone, which is superbly captured by BIS in Super Audio CD. Lugansky, best known for his forcefully Romantic Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, again does his thing, laying it on thick.

All of these accounts are brilliantly played. Pianists, like other athletes, seem to get technically better with every passing generation. And there is something to like in each interpretation. I was taken by Kempf’s lyrically sweet opening bars and by Say’s impetuousness with codas, as if he were rushing out and slamming the door. I was entertained by Lugansky’s rudeness but also impressed by Biss’ good manners. Even DeGaetano’s gall proved amusing for half the sonata, until he started meandering down a chromatic scale as if looking for each step and I ejected the CD in exasperation.

The two most established pianists in this bunch, Orkis and Paik, prove interesting in other ways. Well known as an accompanist to the stars (such as violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter), Orkis is a rock-solid player but without much flair. Color is supplied by his instruments: a couple of plummy period fortepianos and a modern Bosendorfer monster with a pearly tone. The harmonies stand out much more clearly on these instruments than they do on a plusher, more powerful Steinway. The striking timbres make for a nice change of pace, but the curiosity factor dwindles when one is confronted with three competent but ordinary performances of the sonata in a row.

Paik is the more intriguing. The Korean pianist, who will turn 60 this year, has a marvelously clean style that ideally suits French music. Not surprisingly, he has a large following in France, and many of his recordings have been released only overseas. But now Decca has brought out a three-CD set of 11 middle-period sonatas (the first release in another new Beethoven cycle), which ends with the “Appassionata.”

This is Beethoven playing of bracing freshness, which achieves all the clarity of the period piano while retaining the satisfying weight of a modern sound. Paik’s technique seems effortless. He can produce the excitement of speed without rushing. He is sober without being somber. He deserves a place next to Serkin, Aimard and Pollini in the 21st century “Appassionata” pantheon.

But please, enough is enough. There may be more sides to this sonata to reveal. What about a woman’s point of view, for example? Still, how nice it would be if Decca stepped off the Beethoven bandwagon for a while and made available in this country the marvelously civilized Faure recording by Paik that came out four years ago in France. It too has something to say to us -- and not every pianist and his son is saying it.