Search - Maurizio Pollini :: Beethoven: Complete Piano Sonatas

Maurizio Pollini as Beethoven Sonatas cycle has reached completion after nearly 40 years. We celebrate this major event with a handsome 8-CD capbox that provides a fitting testimonial to a great artistic partnership between pianist and record label.

The final recordings in the cycle (opp. 31 & 49) are being released simultaneously as a single CD.

He sets standards with his fabulous technique, delivering performances of magisterial weight and coruscating energy. The Beethoven cycle began in June 1975 with opp. 109 and 110, and reached completion this year with the final CD, of the three sonatas op. 31 and the two of op. 49. This latter recording will appear as a single CD simultaneously with the box set
Undoubtedly this is one of the major achievements in recorded history and the first Beethoven cycle on Deutsche Grammophon since those of Barenboim and Giles in the 1980s.

For the release of the box set, the recordings have been arranged by opus number into a compact 8-CD set, with no duplications of repertoire. Although modest in size, the set stands as a monument of artistic achievement, and a remarkable testimony to an artistic partnership that goes back more than forty years.

The piano sonata was the genre to which Beethoven devoted himself over the longest period of time, his last such work dating from 1822. (The only other genre to garner a similar level of attention from him over the years was that of the string quartet.) Beethoven the pianist was known for his breath-taking virtuosity (give or take the occasional imperfection), his grandiose style, his violent emphasis of contrasts and his exceptional powers of expression in cantabile writing, thanks in part to the perfection of his legato. He ultimately conquered Vienna as a pianist-composer, and his piano sonatas present an extraordinarily varied and revealing portrait of his compositional career, often anticipating its experiments, anxieties and turning points. During his first 12 years in Vienna, the genre was a key testing-ground for Beethoven: of the 32 piano sonatas he published, 23 were composed, without interruption, between 1793 and 1805 in other words, between the revelatory Trios op. 1 and the years in which he produced the Eroica Symphony and the first version of Fidelio. Beethoven s career trajectory cannot be broken down in any straightforward, schematic fashion into clearly defined periods, although there is merit in Wilhelm von Lenz s well-known three style theory. It is obvious that such diverse sonatas as the Op. 2 set, Op. 57 and his last work in the genre, Op. 111, belong to different phases, but it is essential to examine on a case-by-case basis the works internal coherence and the unmistakably Beethovenian character discernible in every single sonata, even the earliest examples. The critical factor throughout would appear to be the composer s constant, inexhaustible desire to keep breaking new ground. Paolo Petazzi