(++++) THE VARIEGATED SONATA

Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 30-32. Young Hyun Cho, piano. Sony. $15.99. 

Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 12-15. Young Hyun Cho, piano. Blue Griffin Recordings. $15.99. 

Allen Sapp: Piano Sonatas II, III (two performances), IV, V, VI and VIII; Suite for Piano; Fantasy III—Homage to Mendelssohn. Norma Bertolami Sapp, piano; Allen Sapp, piano (second performance of Sonata III). Navona. $16.99 (2 CDs). 

     The start of a new recorded cycle of Beethoven’s piano sonatas tells a great deal about the pianist’s thinking and the likely approach to be followed as the sequence unfolds. Many pianists choose not to handle the sonatas chronologically or numerically (they are not quite the same thing), but look to specific groupings that they feel communicate relationships among the works – and elucidate their own relationship with Beethoven and the piano. Young Hyun Cho’s decision to initiate her Beethoven cycle with the final three sonatas is a particularly intriguing one, since this means her first disc, on Sony, focuses on the pinnacle of Beethoven’s work in this form and can reasonably raise the question of where the pianist can possibly go from there. The second Cho CD, from Blue Griffin Recordings, begins to answer that question by encapsulating a specific sonata grouping within Beethoven’s sequence – highlighting some of the composer’s thoughts on the form during one specific, tumultuous year. 

     Beethoven’s Sonatas Nos. 30-32 date to 1820-1822 and have the effect of surveying a wide musical landscape from the summit of a creative mountain that the composer scaled, not without considerable difficulty, in Sonata No. 29 – the second and much more extended of the two he labeled “Hammerklavier.” After completing No. 29 in 1818, Beethoven was silent on the piano-sonata front until he composed the final three, which share a sense of transcendence despite differing in many ways. Polyphony abounds in these works – No. 31 actually contains two fugues in its finale – and the variation form, in which the finales of Nos. 30 and 32 are written, is prominent. All three of the final sonatas build toward their concluding, longest movements, but they arrive there by different routes. Cho’s interpretations do an excellent job of exploring the ways in which the sonatas differ as well as those in which they are loosely related. From the delicate cascading opening of No. 30, through the brief and intense second movement, Cho leads to a finale whose variations are fascinatingly complex: each sounds self-contained, and Cho allows each to form its own world, but each also exists within the purview of an overall concept of which Cho never loses sight. In No. 31, Cho effectively explores the sonata’s many moods, from its simple opening chords through its pervasive emotional warmth to its distinctly operatic finale, which includes a remarkable passage in which the note A is repeated no fewer than 28 times, as if Beethoven intends to explore all the emotive possibilities of a single piano tone. In the two-movement No. 32, Cho opens with grandeur and intensity somewhat akin to that of the Beethoven symphony written in the same key as this sonata, C minor: Symphony No. 5. But the sonata goes in a very different direction from that of the symphony, eventually attaining not triumph but ethereality after a series of amazing variations (including a passage with distinctive proto-jazz rhythms) that conclude in a pastoral mood of contentment and satisfaction. 

     The sensitivity that Cho shows to Beethoven’s many moods and his musical world-building in the final sonatas is present as well in her performances of the four sonatas written in 1801. All of them bear titles: No. 12 is “Sonate mit dem Trauermarsch,” Nos. 13 and 14 are labeled “Sonata quasi una fantasia” with No. 14 further designated “Moonlight,” and No. 15 is “Pastoral.” Not all the labels are Beethoven’s, but all provide keys to elements of the sonatas’ forms of expression – which actually look forward in some interesting ways to Beethoven’s formal experimentation in his very last sonatas. Just one example: Sonata No. 12 has four movements, of which none is in sonata form. The formal elements of these sonatas, however, are not what primarily interest Cho, who – here as in her performances of Nos. 30-32 – is more focused on the works’ emotional content than on the formalities through which the emotive elements are produced. So No. 12 receives, among other things, a strongly rhythmic Scherzo followed by an impressively somber Marcia Funebre whose mood is relieved by the perpetuum mobile of the rondo finale. No. 13 has pervasive dreamlike qualities that Cho extracts with care and delicacy, without oversimplifying or understating anything. The contrast between the drift of the slow movement and the very down-to-earth finale is handled particularly well. In the hyper-popular No. 14, the only one of this grouping in three movements rather than four, Cho eschews any temptation to find something new and different to say about the thrice-familiar music. Instead, she presents it straightforwardly, with perhaps a bit more coolness than necessary – the rhythmic angularity of the Allegretto is a trifle overdone – and she allows the underlying crepuscular feeling of the music to contrast clearly with the more-varied tonal palette of No. 13. In No. 15, the extended first movement – the longest of any movement in these four sonatas – is broadly conceived and pervaded by a sense of unhurried stability. The three remaining movements explore a wider range of emotions that Cho addresses with care and sensitivity. Indeed, Cho’s carefully considered approach throughout the first two volumes of her Beethoven cycle is one of the most salient characteristics of her interpretations, and whets the appetite for the sonata groupings that are still to come. 

     The form of the piano sonata – stretched and shrunk and altered in innumerable ways over time – continues to fascinate composers even today, providing a format for expressive communication of all kinds. The sonatas of Allen Sapp (1922-1999) are well-served on a two-CD Navona release featuring live performances by Sapp’s wife, Norma Bertolami Sapp (1921-1995), who gave the premières of many of her husband’s solo-piano works. The music itself is far more time-limited than Beethoven’s – that is, it is generally written in structural forms and with harmonic expressions typical of the time period in which each sonata was produced, rather than in any especially innovative manner. Nevertheless, this (+++) release has much to recommend it not only for listeners who know Sapp’s work but also for ones seeking to broaden their musical horizons by exploring some less-known 20^th-century solo-piano writing. The Sapp sonatas offered here vary in length from around 14 minutes (Nos. V and VI) to twice that extent (No. VIII), but all have some characteristics of a suite: the movements, even when labeled in traditional ways, tend to be totally unrelated to each other and not to show any particular progress from start to finish. Of course, this is not an unusual approach for the time period in which Sapp wrote: Piano Sonata No. II dates to 1954-1956 and was revised in 1957; Nos. III and IV are from 1957; and then there is a significant compositional gap, with Nos. V and VI dating to 1980 and No. VIII to 1985, revised in 1986. Different dates aside, the sonatas have a great deal in common in the angularity and intensity of their themes, the harmonic freedom bordering on atonality with which they are written, their minimal concern with lyricism or emotional depth, and the performance power required to put across the movements that are most emphatically written. Those include the Agitato finale of No. III, the Decisively opening movement of No. IV, the Vehemently conclusion of No. VIII, and others. Sapp does configure some of his sonatas differently from the usual three-or-four-movement form: No. VI, like Beethoven’s No. 32, is in two movements – but in Sapp’s work, both movements are marked Allegro and are around the same seven-minute length, so the work sounds like an extended single movement. Sonata No. V is in one movement, which is as long as the two of No. VI put together. These two sonatas, from the same year, explore and re-explore much the same musical landscape, with Norma Bertolami Sapp’s strongly emphatic technique and her willingness to pound the keyboard when that is called for making for effective if rather aurally tiring presentations. In addition to the sonatas on these discs, and earlier than any of them, the Suite for Piano (1949) has more charm in its five short movements than do any of the sonatas. And although here too the musical language is pretty much mid-20^th-century standard, it is not used with a quality as acerbic as that of the sonatas: the quiet second-movement Adagio is even willing to reach for a certain level of emotional pathos. The latest-composed work offered here is also not a sonata. It is Fantasy III—Homage to Mendelssohn (1992), an oddly disconnected-sounding piece that is more an exercise in evanescence than a work relating in any meaningful way to the earlier composer. Listeners who do find these Sapp piano works engaging will be interested in hearing the composer’s own performance of Sonata No. III and contrasting it with his wife’s. Both versions can safely be labeled definitive in their own ways, but there are distinct differences between them: Norma Bertolami Sapp brings the many strongly percussive elements of the score to the forefront, while Allen Sapp focuses more on the quieter and less-intensely-emphatic elements. Anyone intrigued by the chance to explore a considerable amount of Allen Sapp’s piano music will find this contrast of two performances a welcome bonus to a skillfully presented set of readings of many of his solo-piano works.