Following two albums dedicated to Brahms’ sonatas and Russian sonatas released in 2008 under Aeon, Marc Coppey and Peter Laul present a Beethoven piece for cello and piano. Recorded live in 2017 in the marvellous baroque treasure that is the Small Hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, this new complete collection features the five sonatas and three series of variations on themes by Handel and Mozart. This corpus for cello and piano by Beethoven provides a striking shortcut through the three periods (formerly known as his three “styles”) of his musical evolution and it ushers in a long line of compositions for cello that only just started emancipating themselves from the continuo to which they were still restricted at the end of the 18th century. Used to emphasise the piano in the first two sonatas, the cello fully expresses itself in the third sonata, in which the dialogue establishes itself equitably and becomes genuinely virtuosic and soloist in the last two sonatas of the Op. 102. The perspective here is from cellist Marc Coppey, winner of the Leipzig Bach Competition at just eighteen years of age, and supported for his debut by Yehudi Menuhin. An international soloist and a professor at the Paris Conservatory, he teams up with pianist Peter Laul, a highly sought-after chamber musician trained at the St. Petersburg Conservatory where he now teaches, after winning prizes at the Bremen International Competition (1995, 1997) and the Moscow Scriabin piano competition (2000). Both musicians also frequently play in a trio with Russian violinist Liana Gourdjia. © François Hudry/Qobuz