Favorite Beethoven

This issue is generous, with 3 sonatas, 2 concertos and Fur Elise on 2 cd's. It goes without saying that the sheer piano-playing is top-quality. In general the slow movements come off best, except for the first movement of the Moonlight and the Andante of concerto 4 (well, Beethoven instructed 'andante con moto', Ashkenazy plays adagio misterioso). Fur Elise may actually be new to my huge collection -- I have never actively sought it since I used to massacre it as a boy under the intimidating gaze of Miss Ommer. This is how it should be played, but am I imagining that A. is using some sort of vibrato in the drumming bass of the middle section? Right or wrong, I like it. The pieces that come off best in totality are the Pathetique and the Emperor, conspicuously beautiful in their slow movements. I have no quarrel with anything in this Pathetique: in the Emperor the outer movements are a touch stately -- A's playing of the theme of the finale, though superbly articulated and magnificent in tone, reminded me irreverently of the Mastersingers.

But this is Beethoven! Beethoven! An adequate interpretation of him needs more than an effortless musical gift. He was a man possessed but disciplined, and these are the attributes that his interpreter has to display, and you don't find them much here. Even at the purely musical level, let alone the interpretative level, A. finds the competition outflanking him. The long right-hand trill near the end of the Emperor is wonderful from him but wonderfuler from Michelangeli. A. redeems his somnolent performance of concerto 4 with a terrific smashed-china fortissimo leading to an exciting wind-up at the end, only Serkin does it that bit better. He does not feel that anything on these discs calls for the stupendous playing he is capable of.
Serkin clearly felt differently about the last movement of the Moonlight. If what it takes to get Beethoven's idea across here, Serkin seems to say, is a blow-your-socks-off technical display, then that's what you will get.

Some things, sadly, are downright objectionable. There is no excuse in this day and age for applying the accelerator to a crescendo. We know that Beethoven (and Weber too) tended actually to hang back in a crescendo, but A. reverts to this old-fashioned abuse in the development of the Appassionata first movement. In the last movement of the same sonata he commits the vulgar outrage of racing through it (as Richter does too) despite B's explicit instruction not to, besides substituting 'loud' for 'quiet' when he feels like it. Again, what is the proper speed for the first movement of concerto 4? We are told that Beethoven took it 'at a tremendous pace'. Modern interpreters seem to know better, because A's flaccid tempo is pretty par for the course nowadays. If you listen just once to the 1944 live performance by Serkin with Toscanini either you will, like me, find the modern school intolerable, or you will resume your placid acquiescence with that and forget how Beethoven did it. The crowning affront is the first movement of the Moonlight. I had to restart the disc to believe my ears at the beginning -- the first note is held and then the the rest moves off majestically like a hearse drawing away from the kerb. As with Lupu in the same movement, the tone-quality is studiously 'beautiful' in conventional terms, there are 'expressive' little hesitations before the main beats, and each time the 'dum--de-dum' monotone is sounded in the right hand the triplet rhythm stops -- yes, literally STOPS. Sorry, folks, but before our general taste gets self-corrupted any further, we ought to stop tolerating let alone admiring this creeping cosy revisionism in preference to what Beethoven asked for.