Garrick Ohlsson's cycle of
Beethoven piano sonatas continues with a pairing of works that may seem odd at first glance: the Piano Sonata No. 29 in B flat major, Op. 106, "Hammerklavier," the mightiest and most extreme of the entire set, is joined by the Piano Sonata No. 16 in G major, Op. 31/1, often accounted as one of the lightest and least consequential. But soon several things become clear. First,
Ohlsson is locating the roots of the "Hammerklavier" and of
Beethoven's late style in general in an experimental strain in his earlier music that began around the time of his encroaching deafness and the "Heiligenstadt testament" crisis. The link lies in a unique (then and now) treatment of variation procedure, which takes on the most intricate kinds of structural significance while not losing their former ornamental function. The massive, almost eerily stretched out varied contrasting strains of the "Hammerklavier" slow movement have their antecedents in the irrepressibly frilly keyboard work of Op. 31, No. 1, which was not a dead end of the "early" period but was, as
Beethoven himself pointed out, a work in "a wholly different manner." Second,
Ohlsson locates the crucial break in
Beethoven's style development at this point, not at the Symphony No. 3, and he changes his style accordingly: his readings of these sonatas lose the dispassionate approach of the earlier works in the cycle and add considerable expressivity to the detailed explication of the music that is the hallmark of the whole set. And finally,
Ohlsson puts it all together in his recording of the "Hammerklavier," which is destined to go down as one of the all-time greats. He is still on the reserved side, and he does not accept the premise, stated in a quotation in the booklet, that the outer movements are among those
Beethoven pieces that exist at the limits of physical possibility. He slows down enough to make everything clear. And while there is still room for the storm-the-barricades approach,
Ohlsson's careful approach steadily builds in power. His reading of the work imbues it with Romantic uncertainty. The opening movement is a set of statements that never quite get finished; the scherzo is questioning rather than jocular; the slow movement sinks into the depths of sadness. Everything leads up to the bizarre introduction to the fugue and its floating fragments of music, unlike anything
Beethoven or anyone else ever wrote, and here
Ohlsson has you on the edge of your seat. The ultimate resolution is in the formalist fugue, and it is here
Ohlsson turns on the gas, with ringing emphasis on the trills holding together the web of polyphony like giant rivets. An extraordinary recording, and surely among the standards for the great "Hammerklavier" sonata.