Johann Sebastian BACH English Suite No.6 in d minor, BWV 811 Ludwig van BEETHOVEN Sonata No. 31 in A-flat major, Op. 110 Anton WEBERN Variations, Op. 27 Piotr Anderszewski, piano

VIRGIN CLASSICS 7243 5 45632 2 5
[60:36] full price

First, to settle the controversy over the release of this disc, this is NOT a new recording but an extraordinarily worthwhile one nonetheless.  Piotr Anderszewski originally made this recording, his first, for Polish Accord in 1996, six years after he had walked out of the Leeds Piano Competition.  That event was a controversy in itself.  He had played Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations brilliantly and was halfway through the Webern Variations when he suddenly stopped playing and walked out of the hall.  As Anderszewski himself phrased it the liner notes,

"Agents threw themselves on me and the press got up a campaign on my behalf. They should have suspected that I was someone with problems and left me alone."

In some ways this disc can be taken not only as superlative music making but also as Anderszewski’s exorcism of inner demons from the trauma of the Leeds experience.  That would make it no coincidence that the heart of this recording is Beethoven’s Op 110 sonata, a piece that was for its composer a similar probing and overcoming of psychic and spiritual turmoil on a deep and highly personal level.

As he showed in his recording of the Diabelli Variations (read the review here), Anderszewski can not only get under the composer’s skin but also delve into his psyche with a maturity and insight far beyond his years.  Leonard Bernstein used to say that whenever he was on the podium, he conducted with the ideal of becoming the composer whose music he was performing.  Anderszewski does exactly this with Op 110.  He plays it as though he is Beethoven, experiencing the music first-hand and improvising as he is going along instead of performing something written down for almost 200 years.  It is maybe no surprise then, as the liner notes state, that Anserszewski would eventually like to conduct the Missa Solemnis, the piece with which Beethoven felt the closest bond and through which he bared his soul as he did in no other work.

When he wrote Opp 109, 110 and 111 in 1820, Beethoven (right) was in the midst of a deep spiritual crisis, something he had been working out in his personal faith compositionally through the Missa.  Those last three sonatas are really emotional and spiritual snapshots of what was churning within himself.  While we do not have without Beethoven himself to interview about what he was feeling while he was composing these works or the Missa, consider the timeline involved.  Beethoven had finished the Kyrie and Gloria of the Missa and interrupted work on the Credo to compose Opp 109-111.  The text of the Credo is basically Romans 10:9-10, which is not only a touchstone of Christianity in general but a direct and highly personal cornerstone of faith:

I believe in one God, the Father almighty
Maker of heaven and earth
And of all things visible and invisible. 
(And) in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God
Born of the Father before all ages:
God of God, light of light, true God of true God;
begotten not made; consubstantial with the Father;
by Whom all things were made. 
Who for us men, and for our salvation,
came from heaven; and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost, of the Virgin Mary; and was made man. 
He was crucified also for us,  suffered under Pontius Pilate, and was buried. 
And on the third day He rose again according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven. 
He sitteth at the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead; and His Kingdom shall have no end. 
I believe in the Holy Ghost,
the Lord and giver of life,
who proceedeth from the Father and the Son,
Who together with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified; Who spoke by the Prophets. 
I believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic Church. 
I confess one baptism for the remission of sins.  And I await the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.  Amen.

According to the liner notes for the Levine/Salzburg recording of the Missa (and mentioned in other sources) Beethoven's faith was a highly personal but conflicted one, with Christianity, the philosophy of the Enlightenment and Eastern religious philosophy colliding in his mind and spirit.  He wrote of God as "my refuge, my rock" in his personal diary of 1812-18 while also quoting passages from Eastern sources.  Beethoven was a contradiction in other ways as well.  He was a purported lover of humanity who acted like a self-absorbed misanthrope.  He was given to rages over the most minor of human foibles yet could look on those tirades with humorous detachment.  (Is it any surprise that one of his wittiest compositions is titled “Rage Over a Lost Penny, Stormed Out in a Caprice”?)  An alcoholic father mentally and physically abused Beethoven as a child yet, in the pattern of many who are abused, the composer became an oppressive and overly protective guardian to his nephew Karl.  He was petty, childish, unforgiving, a continual whiner about his circumstances and not the most honest businessman when it came to his compositions, yet he wrote some of the loftiest music in human history.  Plus Beethoven was in continual torment over his deafness, which at this point had become nearly total.  Inner demons the man had in plenty.

It is interesting that Beethoven stopped work on the Missa just at the point that, in terms of Romans 10:9-10, he would have to have had to come to terms with himself in his heart and commit or perhaps reaffirm himself to a personal relationship with his Lord and Savior.  It might have taken a lot of inner reflection, a dealing with inner demons and a realization that he could not go on in the way he had, that he had to surrender himself to the leading of an inner power.  Considering all the testimonies of people who have claimed to have become Christians through various personal trials, and considering how seriously and intensely Beethoven apparently believed in the words he set to music in the Missa from the finished product, the suggestion that he had such a similarly personal revelation does not seem that outlandish.  It is not that much further a stretch to suggest that he would also express his personal wrestling match with himself, his emotions and his faith in Op 109-111, perhaps not overtly but as a matter of course from expressing himself directly and personally in his music as a whole.  In other words, we may not have an interview with Beethoven to confirm all of this but there are enough clues to make an educated case for it.

This seems to be exactly how Anderszewski approaches Op 110 – with a sense of deep internal crisis and introspection leading to revelation.  Some complain that the first movement as Beethoven wrote it sounds anemic and meandering, and lacks the grandeur of Beethoven's other great sonatas.  But it is not meant to be a grand statement.  It is a quiet and very lyrical beginning much in the same vein as Op 101.  Does the beginning of Op 101 meander?  Or the begining of the Moonlight, for that matter?  Seems like Beethoven is beginning in what would be a familiar manner for him in that movement.  Part of Beethoven's genius was that he could be so moving and communicate so much in the quieter moment of his works as well as the "great" ones.

When the piece modulates into the minor key, the sunniness of the opening is increasingly bathed in shadows, then dusk.  Even as Beethoven tries to continue smiling, the calm with which he started is eroding fast.  It is one of the subtlest yet most pervasive and devastating moments in the composer’s output, as complex as anything in the late Mozart piano concertos or the last sonatas of Schubert, with several layers of emotions running independent of and into one another all at the same time.  The character of this movement as it progresses is more than a rising level of tragedy; it is a psychic unraveling the likes of which we have never heard in Beethoven’s output before now.  And as it progresses, this music becomes an increasingly easy place to fall into melodrama or to overplay with the fervor of the Hammerklavier or Appassionata.  Anderszewski understands the difference here.  He knows that this opening movement is infinitely more intricate and multifaceted; instead of onward and forward, we are going inward, becoming increasingly, almost obsessively ruminative.  Time has literally come to a standstill.  Anderszewski plays this music more like the Schubert B flat major sonata than what many of us are used to – never really slow but lingering, tinged instead of steeped with regrets and longings, with nothing overstated but every sentiment laid bare and nothing resolved.

The arioso dolente that follows this movement is no rustic dance or light interlude in Anderszewski’s hands.  It is a danse macabre, a whirling, vicious affair with jabbing accents and no let-up until the final bars, when the nightmare finally fades in the first moments of waking.  Anderszewski slows the pace and softens his tone in those final measures – a highly effective transition as well as highlighting musically the thought most of have had after an especially bad dream: “Thank God it’s morning.”

The opening of the final movement moves on from “Thank God it’s morning” to “Oh God, it’s morning” – the second thought that can come when life look especially bad.  The final movement is the spiritual and emotional core of the work – Beethoven groping in the dark until the light breaks in with a repeated chord leading to the final fugue.  That chord, played over and over a little louder each time until the piano is practically shaking, has been called by some one of the most absurd moments in all of classical music.  It is really Beethoven’s moment of epiphany, his personal breakthrough leading to the uninhibited joy of the final measures.  As in the first movement, Anderszewski’s interpretation is phenomenal.  He traces the emotional and musical peaks and valleys with sensitivity, conviction and immediacy both fresh and a little startling to hear.  For once the ending of this piece is not just another triumphant conclusion but a moment of cleansing and catharsis, perhaps for Anderszewski as well as for Beethoven.

How appropriate it is to have Bach’s D minor English suite precede the Beethoven as an opener.  This is some of the most thoughtful, penetrating Bach I have heard in a long time, with each line of counterpoint given not only its own voice but individual characteristics.  The music becomes as much conversation as it does musical exchange and interplay, never predictable but always fresh-sounding, as though it, like the Beethoven, is being improvised on the spot.  It is occasionally very moving but never overdone, from the wistful bittersweetness of the courante and sarabande to the humorously tongue-in-cheek quality of the second gavotte (which shows that yes, Bach did have a sense of humor after all).  Anderszewski gives the music ample time to breathe but never drags or forces it into a hypermanic state, and treats it without any starch of pomposity.  Everything fits.                                                                                                                        (above: J.S. Bach)

Above all, Anderszewswki never forgets that these movements are dances.  Accents are kept pointed, rhythms lively and no matter what speed, to borrow Duke Ellington’s phrase, everything swings.  The wonderfully soulful way Anderszewski opens the prelude – an introspective searching not far removed from the Beethoven – gives way to highly animated and high-spirited play, with Anderszewski reveling in the polyphony and melody while keeping the music sprightly and light-footed.  The rest of the suite is treated just as nimbly.  All this from someone who says Bach “was not really my thing” when he recorded it.

The Webern, on the other hand, was very much Anderszewski’s thing, a hangover from Leeds that he plays here with the searching intensity he brought to Bach and Beethoven plus a volcanic, white-hot passion that takes the listener by the throat.  I’d never realized the connection between this work and the Beethoven until hearing them side by side in this recording.  Webern and Beethoven both begin with a searching first movement,  follow it with a spiky, aggressive middle episode and progress to a third movement that penetrates even more deeply into the human psyche, continually questioning, answering, then questioning the answers.  In Webern, though, the final notes are both resolute and inconclusive.  It is a double-sided message that mirrors life itself as a continual and perhaps in some ways never-ending quest.
above: Anton Webern

Overall this disc is everything it promises to be and a tremendous amount more.  The liner notes call Anderszewski’s Bach “an adventure in sound,” but the performances as a whole are incisive and insightful musical explorations of the soul and spirit as well.  It not only needs to be heard to be believed, but virtually demands it.

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