Music remade along the way

On Wednesday night, András Schiff will begin the first cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas in Walt Disney Concert Hall. Plans call for him to present the 32 sonatas chronologically in eight programs over two seasons. The series will be special.

I say that not as a forecast of Schiff’s performances, although the Hungarian pianist, who has been presenting the cycle in select European cities over the last couple of years, happens to have a way with Beethoven. The release of his live recording of the cycle on ECM, taken from concerts in Zurich, Switzerland, has just passed the midway point. Vol. 5 came out last month, and it is as illuminating and multidimensional as the previous four.

But the Disney concerts will be special because Beethoven sonata cycles are always special. These sonatas are a tour de force for any pianist and a remarkable tour through the mind and experience of a composer many of us consider to be the most visionary musician who ever lived. If the 16 string quartets are Beethoven’s spiritual biography and the nine symphonies his public face, the sonatas are his most private, least guarded and most risk-taking scores. A player must channel Beethoven while undertaking his or her own inner journey. I can think of no performance challenge that is its equal, in any medium.

Mastering the cycle may be a life’s work, yet more and more pianists seem eager to devote the enormous time and energy, to say nothing of psychic intensity, the sonatas require. The scores have lost none of their mystique, relevance or psychological power in some two centuries. We haven’t gotten to the bottom of them yet, and Schiff is but one of several pianists currently embarked on cycles in the concert hall and/or on record.

Daniel Barenboim, who has had the sonatas in his repertory for well over a half-century, can be heard (and seen) in a new set of DVDs on EMI documenting his performances in Berlin in summer 2005. Paul Lewis, a lively young British pianist with a light touch, is up to Vol. 3 in his elegant cycle on Harmonia Mundi. Mitsuko Uchida, the vibrant Japanese pianist, might have it in mind to record the cycle backward. She has followed her CD last year of the final three sonatas with a new one on Philips of the two that preceded those, including the massive “Hammerklavier.” Angela Hewitt, the understated and eloquent Canadian pianist, has quietly started a series on Hyperion, with the second CD due this month. The Dutch Ronald Brautigam is recording the sonatas on pianos from Beethoven’s time, and the German Gerhard Oppitz has a cycle underway as well. In the Southland in recent seasons, we have had performances of the cycle from the Japanese pianist Mari Kodama and the local virtuoso Mark Robson.

But that’s only the half of it. Many other pianists -- the quirkily brilliant Brazilian Nelson Freire, the excitingly percussive Frenchman François-Frédéric Guy and the lyrical young American Jonathan Biss -- have new CDs devoted to some of the sonatas. A real find is a budget issue on Brilliant Classics of the deeply considered and moving playing of four sonatas by Harris Goldsmith, a New York critic who never had the career as a pianist he deserved. And, from the sublime to the ridiculous, a couple of computer nerds in Boston have gotten their hands on the “Hammerklavier” sonata and made a CD of their digital doctoring.

All this music-making, moreover, has generated a wealth of literature about the sonatas, much of it by the pianists themselves. In liner notes, Schiff, Hewitt, Harris and Biss write about, or are interviewed about, the sonatas they play. Books on the sonatas have appeared in the last few years by Robert Taub and Charles Rosen, both first-rate pianists and thinkers.

Barenboim has plenty to say about the sonatas, as he reveals in his set’s two extra DVDs, which contain six hourlong films of master classes he gave in Chicago with noted young players, Biss and Lang Lang among them. In London last year, Schiff preceded his cycle with talks about the music the day before each of his eight concerts. These witty, incisive and deeply thoughtful sonata tour guides, some lasting nearly a whole afternoon, proved even hotter tickets than the actual concerts. The lectures, which were given at the keyboard, were recorded, and the Guardian newspaper has made them available as free MP3 downloads on its website. You will find them at www.guardian.co.uk/schiff.

Conquering the impossible

So why the sonatas, and why now? There is no why. These pieces have never been out of fashion. But fashions in performance and musical thinking do change, and something evidently is in the air. CDs are supposed to be over. Books on music supposedly don’t sell. But Beethoven, as Barenboim and Schiff both emphasize time and again, is about conquering the impossible. There is no stopping these sonatas, and as opportunities to hear and read about this music have multiplied, the conversation has become very complicated and rich. Keeping up with contemporary sonata performances, commentary and scholarship would be a full-time job.

The current sonata fascination may be related to our interest in narrative. Beethoven was a dramatic composer. He was a master of the sonata form, in which two themes or thematic groups duke it out and find some sort of resolution. He also provides the grander narrative of a giant of an artist defying everything, be that classical structure (meant to represent the world as operating logically), the artist’s place in society or the physical nature of sound.

The sonatas represent an incredibly fruitful three-decade artistic journey that covers an enormous amount of musical territory with a wealth and depth and breadth of expression the likes of which music had never known. The first sonata, Opus 2, No. 1 -- written when Beethoven was 25, and dedicated to his teacher, Haydn -- begins with a rocket motif, a blastoff. The last, Opus 111, ends on the far side of the moon in otherworldly, high-register trills, a sound new to music. Every stylistic convention of the time gets broken somewhere along the line -- everything Beethoven’s audiences may have thought they knew about music was challenged. The effect is as if relativity and quantum theories had been invented in music; Beethoven goes from a Newtonian universe to an Einsteinian one.

Barenboim and Schiff, although very different in their approaches, both keep returning to the ideas of sound and silence, chaos and order. The physical demands of the sonatas are uppermost on their minds. Beethoven asks, for instance, for a crescendo on a single note, which is a physical impossibility on the piano. Once a key is struck and the note sounds, that note will decay, and a pianist can’t do a thing about it.

Barenboim’s solution is mystical. If you believe you can make the crescendo, really believe it, he tells one of his pupils, you will then be able to play the next note as if that dynamic effect had occurred, and listeners will become believers themselves. For Beethoven, as Barenboim later points out and in what Schiff takes as a central theme, the breaking down of barriers is a necessary exploration of the condition of life, a coming to grips with suffering and redemption.

Barenboim suggests that Beethoven does away with the notion that one mellows with age. In the questing last sonatas, everything breaks down. Long lines turn choppy, and abrupt changes in dynamics, register and mood are commonplace. Beethoven had a genius for making connections in his music, but he also had an instinct for the basic laws of physics, which say that chaos comes from order, not the other way around.

Trips through time

THE sonatas exist in both the past and the present. And that is why the uninspired performance of the “Hammerklavier” by Jon Sakata digitally modified by Michael Gardiner and John Latartara on Centaur is inane.

Beethoven can be the impetus for inspired time-tripping. Leif Inge’s “9 Beet Stretch,” which takes an indifferent recording of the Ninth Symphony and digitally extends it for 24 hours, expands harmonies to the point of altering a sympathetic listener’s consciousness. But this version of the “Hammerklavier” has precisely the opposite effect. Part of the excitement of Schiff’s and Barenboim’s recordings of their live performances is the sense of danger. Schiff tells how some pianists cheat and play the first chord of the “Hammerklavier” with two hands, not just the left, because it is so easy to miss a note. If you miss, you miss, Schiff says. That’s only human, and Beethoven couldn’t care less. What matters is the thrill of the left hand flying in the air and landing (one hopes) on that B-flat triad.

The digital “Hammerklavier” is little more than silly subversion. The two computer musicians yammer about what to do with their trivial computer effects over the slow movement. They break up sound, not realizing that Beethoven has already broken things up with a purpose.

No permanent damage is done, though. Valid and thoughtfully provocative versions of Beethoven’s sonatas have never been more plentiful. The new set by Barenboim and Schiff’s five volumes are among the best. The former is broadly paced, warmly romantic and wonderfully of the moment. Schiff has a crisper tone, a cleaner approach, feels more classical and more modern at the same time (if such a thing is possible) and is full of revelatory detail.

The other ongoing recorded cycles are not quite in this class. Paul Lewis has the advantage of an airy fleetness that is highly attractive. One can listen to him for hours with pleasure and without fatigue, but partly because of his relative lack of weight or depth -- Barenboim and Schiff will wear you out much more quickly, for all the right reasons. Angela Hewitt’s Beethoven is modest, carefully played as written and recorded in splendid Super Audio sound that has a satisfaction all its own.

There is, in the end, no single path for this journey. Every pianist who attempts this cycle is an intrepid pilgrim. Beethoven changes pianists, and he changes serious listeners.

“I think a human being not able to feel the mystery of the beginning of the ‘Waldstein,’ ” Barenboim says of this middle-period sonata, “is a poorer human being than one who has.

“It’s as simple as that.”

mark.swed@latimes.com

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András Schiff

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday and Oct. 17

Price: $35 to $88

Contact: (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.com