Beethoven Sonatas

Make no mistake. These are great performances of these ground-breaking pieces. They achieve a perfect balance of intellectual rigour (in the voicing of fugal and contrapuntal passages, for example, or in the elucidation of Beethoven's fascination with and elaboration of variation form in his late period) with passion and emotion.

To take just the first movement of Op.109, at the start Uchida manages to capture the feeling that this is music caught, as it were, in media res, that it was going on before the sonata begins and that it just emerges from the silence. The opening theme is delivered with ideal simplicity, but Beethoven's stark elisions of sonata form mean we are carried alarmingly quickly into startling harmonic territory: Uchida disguises nothing in the arpeggios that drag us from key to key, before the sunlight emerges with clarity in the second subject. Within just a couple of minutes, we have been through a daring development section, a modified recapitulation and an extended coda that restores us to the simplicity of the opening. Uchida makes this frighteningly concentrated thought absolutely cogent and clear.

The variation movement that ends Op.109 lasts twice as long as the other two movements together and covers a vast emotional range. Uchida has the measure equally of the seemingly naïve melodic simplicity of the theme and the changing tempos, moods, dynamics and rhythmic complexities that Beethoven subjects it to.

In Op.110, it is again the stark contrasts inherent in the material that Uchida brings out. The lyricism of the opening movement against the disturbing rhythmic lurches of the second: the sad (dolente) lament of the Arioso introduction to the fierce grandeur of the fugue which follows it and to which the whole sonata seems to have been aiming. Note also the intense darkness with which Uchida invests the chords that lead from the reprise of this Arioso into the return of the fugue.

Op.111, in these performances, is the towering pinnacle not only of this disc but of the whole cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas. There is immense power in Uchida's performance of the opening movement. She never shies away from the expressionist leaps and harsh dissonances implicit in much of the dark C Minor writing. But it is the final set of variations that crowns it all. Another deceptively simple theme, played here with intense quietude, leads into an even greater range of variations than those in Op.109. Uchida guides us unerringly through the increasing rhythmic complexity of the early variations, back through the theme decorated with what she rightly calls 'celestial arabesques' into areas of severe darkness and brilliant light with all those wild and wonderful extended trills that so fascinated late Beethoven and finally to a sublimely ethereal calm at the end. This is a superlative performance of this many facetted movement.

The piano sound on this CD is a delight as well. Recorded at the Snape Maltings, this is decidedly not one of those in-yer-face, brilliantly lit, clattery piano sounds. There is the feeling of a real hall ambience here, with the space for the sound to breathe and grow before it reaches the microphones and our ears. This doesn't imply any compromises in dynamic range or tonal colour; simply an ideal, best seat-in-the-house naturalness.

Need I say more? A real winner.