Adras Schiff plays Beethoven at Perelman

Four out of five isn’t bad in most circumstances, unless you’re fighting fires. The Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff, who is making a traversal of the complete Beethoven sonata cycle in chronological order, brought numbers 22-26 to the Kimmel Center’s Perelman Theater on a day otherwise preoccupied with the World Series celebration.

Schiff, who is a very fine pianist with a delicate touch in the Romantic repertory (as he demonstrated in an encore from Schumann’s Fantasy in C, Op. 17), played the Beethoven 22nd and 24-26 with a rich and rewarding hand. Unfortunately, the one sonata that left this listener almost completely disengaged was the colossus of the group, the Appassionata.

The Appassionata is to piano literature what the Eroica is to the classical symphony: a revolutionary work that shattered previous forms. Most pianists who approach it acknowledge this and try to find the shock of the new even in what has become a well-worn standard. This can mean overplaying it (as one reviewer of a New York performance of this recital pointed out, the Appassionata is typically performed with the Liszt B minor sonata in mind).

The Appassionata really requires Romantic expression combined with steely discipline— a difficult feat to achieve. Every enduring work of art is changed by the works that have followed it, no less than by contemporary fashions of interpretation, and this history is part of the work.

‘Strict constructionists’ in the music world

A great deal of effort has been expended in the past two generations in trying to approximate not only the sound but the supposed sense of “early”—i.e., pre-Baroque through early Romantic— music. This was, and remains, a useful corrective to the excesses of Stokowski-style orchestrations. But the attempt to return to original performance style has always reminded me of judicial strict constructionists who want to find the original intent of the constitution. They’ll find it includes slavery, too; and slavish efforts to re-imagine a lost playing style, like all efforts to reverse history, end simply in myth.

This injunction applies particularly to playing Beethoven in chronological order. His symphonies, notoriously, follow a pattern in which the bold and exploratory style of the later odd-numbered set (3, 5, 7, 9) contrasts with the relatively more mannered even-numbered one (4, 6, 8).

The piano sonatas zigzag even more obviously. The daring early Pathetique is followed by the modest duo of the Opus 14 set; the Moonlight sonata by the bucolic Opus 28; the heroic Waldstein by the miniature Opus 54; and so on. Only with the last sonatas is there no looking back, but an ever-deepening exploration of the form.

It is for this reason that traversals of the cycle usually mix and match, rather than follow a straight course. Of course, there’s something to be said for proceeding in chronological order. We tend to read Beethoven as a full-time revolutionary who never paused to catch his breath or play with the models he transcended. Retracing his compositional steps as he actually took them (insofar as opus numbers are a reliable guide, which is another question) reveals instead a landscape of peaks and valleys. The danger in such performance, however, is the temptation to create plateaus.

The work that broke Beethoven’s mold

It was this temptation to which Schiff succumbed in the first half of his program, which paired the two-movement Opus 54 with the Appassionata. Opus 54 is a curious piece, with two broadly contrasted themes interrupting each other in the opening tempo d’un minuetto, and a rather scampering finale. The theme of this finale has a marked resemblance to the opening one of the Appassionata, a point Schiff made in his performance.

This rethinking— really reconceptualization of ideas— is one of the most fascinating aspects of Beethoven’s style; but it’s a mistake to imagine that the Appassionata can be read simply or primarily as a broader extension of its predecessor. With this work Beethoven entered a new sonic and intellectual world for the keyboard, and if he took some of the materials of the previous world with him (ex nihilo, nihil), the transformation was such that it can take no mold but its own.

Up to a point, there’s value in finding links to the past in the Appassionata. Certainly one does not want (or need) to make Liszt of it. But Mr. Schiff so underplayed the work, and stretched its textures and chordal progressions so pedantically in an effort to expose classical roots, that it landed with a thud. The middle movement was almost dull, and only at the end of the finale, where it is almost impossible to play at all without the passion the score demands, did the performance take wing: too late, alas, to soar very far.

The later Beethoven renounces heroism

The program’s second half was more successful. Opuses 78 and 79 are both works of sparkle and wit, relaxed outings for the master although not without darker shadings. I particularly liked the finale of Opus 78, where Schiff invited us to share his own enjoyment of the music fully.

The concluding work, the Sonata Opus 81 (Les Adieux), is an altogether more complex and substantial affair, and, with its quicksilver changes of mood, more difficult to project. We enter, or perhaps better said anticipate, the world of the late sonatas here, with their renunciation of Beethoven’s mid-period heroism for a more probing, inward style; in certain passages, one can even hear the tread of the Hammerklavier. The contrast of Les Adieux with its own immediate predecessors is less a matter of scale than temperament, however, and Schiff made the adjustment very nicely, producing the most searching and successful performance of the night.

One could go away happy with that, as a capacity audience did past the phalanx of Philadelphia’s finest that lined the Kimmel atrium and into the Phillies paraphernalia-strewn night. The Appassionata, though, will have to wait for another day.


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