Beethoven - The Piano Sonatas

The Guardian 80

András Schiff
(ECM 11 CDs)

Taken from recitals he gave at the Tonhalle in Zürich between 2004 and 2007, András Schiff’s cycle of Beethoven’s piano sonatas appeared chronologically disc by disc. Boxed together now, the ordering and even packaging of the original discs has been preserved, meaning, for example, that the E flat major Sonata Op 7 and the Waldstein Op 53 (with its original slow movement, the Andante Favori, as an appendix) each get a disc all to themselves. Taken as a whole, the set is a bit uneven: there are mighty performances of the later sonatas that sweep all before them, and accounts of some of the earlier works that seem prissy and over-manicured, with moments when Schiff could have allowed the music to flow more naturally than it does.

But the collection now includes the encores that Schiff played at the original recitals. There are pieces by Bach, Mozart, Schubert (including marvellously enigmatic performances of the late C minor Allegretto D915 and the first of the D946 Piano Pieces) and Haydn (the whole of the G minor Sonata), all perfectly fashioned and carefully matched to what had preceded them in each recital. For those who collected the ECM sonata discs when they first came out, the encores have also been released separately; those who invest in the complete set won’t have many disappointments either.

The Guardian 60

Andreas Staier
(Harmonia Mundi, two CDs)
The three op 31 sonatas, all written in 1802, sound lean and coherent on an 1810 piano, if occasionally things feel a little too well-mannered

Ein Neuer Weg (A New Way) is the title of Andreas Staier’s album, which brings together the piano works that Beethoven composed at the very beginning of the 19th century. All were published in 1802, the year in which Beethoven also finally accepted that his deafness could only worsen, and he revealed his incurable illness to his brothers in his famous Heiligenstadt testament. He was dissatisfied, too, with the music he had written up to that time, and the three Op 31 sonatas began his radical reinvention of the form that he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart.