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Who recorded Beethoven piano sonatas?
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The best fortepiano recordings of Beethoven that I've heard are all on the Globe label, a superb record label based in Utrecht: Ronald Brautigam has recorded 2CDs: early piano variations, and the first piano sonatas (opera 2 & 49). He plays a 1790s Walter.
- Artur Schnabel. The first pianist to record the complete Beethoven piano sonatas in the 1930s, just a few years after electrical recording was invented, Schnabel set the standard by which all subsequent recordings was set, and his playing is acclaimed for its intelligence and insight, emotional depth and spiritual understanding of this music.
- Daniel Barenboim. “I’ve known these works for many years….but whenever I go back to this music I find something new.” Beethoven’s piano sonatas have followed Daniel Barenboim throughout his career, and such is his affection for this music he has recorded the complete piano sonatas five times, most recently during lockdown when, during this period of enforced isolation, he decided to approach the sonatas anew.
- Annie Fischer. It is interesting to note that few women pianists have recorded the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, Annie Fischer being an exception. The music of Beethoven was central to Fischer’s career and her recordings are still much admired, nearly 30 years after her death.
- Igor Levit. “Beethoven’s music kind of creates this link between the player, the music, the audience. This triangle is enormously intense.” – Igor Levit in an interview with Jon Wertheim.
Ludwig van Beethoven wrote 32 mature piano sonatas between 1795 and 1822. (He also wrote 3 juvenile sonatas at the age of 13 [1] and one unfinished sonata, WoO. 51.) Although originally not intended to be a meaningful whole, as a set they comprise one of the most important collections of works in the history of music. [2] .
We name some of the finest recordings of the complete cycles of Beethoven's piano sonatas available now to buy or stream.
- Pathétique
- The Moonlight
- Waldstein
- Appassionata
- Hammerklavier
- Piano Sonatas, Opp.109, 110, 111
To single out just a few. The most important of the early Sonatas is the Pathétique. For the first time Beethoven uses a slow introduction, and an introduction of such weight you know something truly significant is going on. The opening chord breaks once and for all with Haydn and Mozart. You are in Beethoven’s world now. Among Beethoven’s few clos...
The most famous movement of any of the 32 Piano Sonatas is the opening movement of The Moonlight – the Sonata he composed for the woman he wanted to marry, Giulietta Guicciardi [see Chapter 6, Beethoven’s Women]. For the first time he put the slow movement first (something neither Haydn or Mozart ever did). Just like the opening bars of the Fifth S...
We already know the origin of the Waldstein from Chapter 3, The Spaniard. The gloriously spacious theme of the final movement is prefaced by a mysterious, fragmented middle movement, which presages it perfectly. That was not Beethoven’s original intention. The middle movement was a long complete piece with an instantly catchy tune. He realised it w...
Wagner’s favourite was the Appassionata. He loved playing it, and marvelled at the theme of the first movement rising from the depths. Once again, as with the Pathétique, the middle movement is simplicity itself, almost a theme on a single note. The entire work has such nobility and passion it is small wonder the publisher gave it the name by which...
We come to the most monumental of all the Piano Sonatas, the Hammerklavier. This was the work that Beethoven composed at the height of the traumatic court case, when he was composing little else. What spurred him to do it? More than likely the thoroughly prosaic fact that at the beginning of the year he had received a remarkable gift. The famous Lo...
The Hammerklavier is often taken to signify the start of Beethoven’s Late Period. Certainly everything that now follows – Missa Solemnis, Ninth Symphony, Piano Sonatas, String Quartets– are on an entirely different plane to what has gone before. Profoundly deaf, deeply miserable, failing health – and the greatest works of all. The final set of Pian...
The first pianist known to have recorded all of them (1932–1935), Artur Schnabel, remarked of the sonatas, “I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed.” Why did Beethoven set about these radical changes in an established genre?
Artur Schnabel blazed a trail when recording them all in the 1930s. His set is one of the great milestones in the history of recorded sound, and can be purchased either as an EMI box, or separately, well transferred, on Naxos.
