Lipkin plays Beethoven at Curtis

The pianist Seymour Lipkin has had a career of extraordinary distinction. He studied at Curtis with Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski, won a Rachmaninoff competition, and went on to a career performing with every major American orchestra. He was an assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein (like Lenny, he studied under Serge Koussevitzky). Today, at the age of 83, he teaches at both Curtis (since 1969) and Juilliard (since 1986). Lipkin has recorded just about everything Beethoven ever wrote for piano: the five concertos, the 32 sonatas, the ten violin and piano sonatas, the five cello sonatas.

Lipkin's recent solo Beethoven recital at Curtis Institute drew a near-capacity house. The announced program included Beethoven's Sixth Sonata, but it disappeared without explanation.

That put the recital a bit on the short side, but in a way it clarified the remainder of the program, too: the Fantasy in G minor, Op. 77; the Sonata # 24, Op. 78, and the mighty Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 106, the summit of Beethoven's achievement in the form and still one of the most difficult works in the world to play. For a long time, it was indeed considered too difficult— a combination of intimidating form and impenetrable content, and so it languished along with the master's also "unplayable" late string quartets.

Beethoven's toughest nut

There are technically more demanding works now, of course: scores that look like a map of the moon, or that require the player to crawl in and out of the piano like a crab, pounding notes, plucking strings, and performing every act on the instrument short of fellatio. But, as anyone who has ever tried to play a page of Chopin knows, the real difficulty begins where the notes end, and the Hammerklavier is still a notoriously tough nut to crack.

Sailing up to it with the Fantasy and the brief, two-movement Op. 78 Sonata— about a 20-minute exercise— highlighted some of what one would encounter in the Hammerklavier: abrupt and mercurial shifts of mood and tempo; unexpected bursts of energy; and pauses of deceptive calm. These works seem to be relatively minor Beethoven, but even that means the storm of a musical intelligence that has no peer except in Bach, and no temperamental equal anywhere. From the opening keyboard sweep of Beethoven's Fantasy, one hears a composer determined to clear the table not only of what anyone has said before him but of what he himself has already said.

Shaky moments

The opening of the Fantasy, which repeats itself before settling down in search of a melody, is echoed in the thundering seven-note motif that begins the Hammerklavier, which likewise is repeated. This motif turns out to be the beginning of the main theme of the Allegro, whose remaining notes both extend and develop the motif— and with that brilliant elision we are off to the races.

Lipkin, a slight figure, tore into the music like a jockey determined to let his mount know who's in charge, and he kept to generally brisk tempos throughout. A lifetime of thought and performance was evident in his playing, but, at this point in his career his technique has its shaky moments, and some passages were blurry.

The deficits were most apparent in the fleet Scherzo: Assai vivace, less in the notes themselves than in the airy, ethereal fantasy that the music projects. There were fine moments of introspection in the Adagio, and dash enough for the tremendous fugue of the finale.

An old man's music

There can be no doubt that the Hammerklavier is a beast that will wear out its rider, and although Lipkin brought the work to a satisfying close, I must report that a few paces got away from him.

Beethoven himself was approaching 50 when he wrote it, and this work, along with the A major Sonata, Op. 101, announces his late period. It's an old man's music in the Sophoclean sense— more properly, the work of an ageless one— but it requires the most youthful energies to realize it.

I'd say the audiences who heard Lipkin 20 years ago were probably more fortunate than this most recent one. But, whatever his present limitations, any performance by Lipkin is still a master class.