DiscountDelight - "Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Opp. 109, 110 & 111"
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List Price: $16.98
Our Price: $12.87
Your Save: $ 4.11 ( 24% )
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Manufacturer: Philips
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 0028947569350
Label: Philips
Manufacturer: Philips
Publisher: Philips
Release Date: 2006-04-25
Studio: Philips
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: wonderful recording
Comment: I heard Mistuko Uchida played op. 109 live. At the time I thought the tempo was a bit slow. She picked up the tempo nicely in this recording. Every phrase, down to every note in the CD was beautifully done. However, they are not overly "smooth and sweet" as her Mozart was often complained about. There are fire, sparks, and bite at all the right spots. For Mistuko fans---she wrote her own program note for this recording. It is quite worth reading (with her personal hand-writing and hand-drew musical samples too), especially if you are interested in music theory or musicology. I Highly recommend this CD.
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Summary: I Wonder.....
Comment: if Ms Uchida's photo on the cover doesnt reflect her reaction to hearing another blah performance that appeals most to those who prefer middle of the road interpretations of great piano music.
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Summary: Among the Best Recordings of Beethoven's Last Three Piano Sonatas
Comment: I wish Mitsuko Uchida hadn't waited so long to start recording Beethoven's piano sonatas, having already demonstrated her keen interest in and superlative playing of Mozart's and Schubert's major works for the piano. This is quite simply her best recording of Beethoven's piano scores I have yet heard, coupled with some elegant, often profound, musicological notes on these scores which she has written in the liner notes to this CD. I am especially impressed with her thoughtful, yet expressive, performances of both the Opus 109 and 111 piano sonatas; these rank alongside recordings I have heard from both Alfred Brendel and Maurizio Pollini as among the finest I've come across. The recordings also successfully capture the warm ambience of the Snape Maltings, England concert hall, enhancing the vibrant qualities of her performances.
In the liner notes Uchida observes how Beethoven employed motifs from Opus 109 as though they were germinating seeds of passages which he would elaborate further in the Opus 110 and 111 sonatas. She also does this in her playing of these works, offering quite nuanced, at times, understated performances, most notably in the second movement of Opus 111, which she notes in the liner notes as sounding almost like jazz or boogie-woogie. Hopefully this splendid CD is the first of a long-awaited Beethoven piano sonata cycle; without question, it is an excellent beginning for both Philips and Mitsuko Uchida.
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Summary: One of the finest Op.111 around
Comment: As always with Uchida, her music is full of intelligent thoughts and details, yet it is very clean and serine. I like her Op.109 and Op.111, especially Op.111 is very successful. Toward the end of the 2nd movement in Op.111, she shows the unlimited depth of Beethoven's world with breathtaking trills. This is surely one of the finest performances of Op.111.
As for Op.109, the ultimate version for me is Stephen Kovacevich's.
For Op.110, she needs a stronger and bigger frame as a whole. My choice goes to Stephen Kovacevich's intelligent yet fiery performance or Richard Goode's balanced yet powerful version.
I love Uchida's Op.111, or Kovacevich's.
I think these 3 pianists finally broke the tedious and dull performances by the greats in the past and they set the new standard and possibilities for Beethoven's greatest piano works.
A great achievement.
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Summary: SUPERLATIVE LATE-BEETHOVEN PLAYING
Comment: This is not only piano playing but also musical thinking of a very high order. In her fascinating notes that accompany this disc, Uchida is at pains to emphasise the connections and interrelationships between Beethoven's last three piano sonatas. Certainly the impact to be had from playing all three sonatas at a sitting is cumulative, growingly intense and finally overwhelming.
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 na?ve 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.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas have long been regarded as the Mt. Everest of the form, heights that can be scaled only by pianists who possess the keyboard technique to realize the depth of the composer’s vision. By those standards, if Uchida isn’t the equal of such giants as Arrau, Kempff, and Schnabel, she certainly comes close enough to make this an outstanding release. Her pianissimos are feathery-light; her fortes are as powerful as one might wish, and her trills are analogues of Beethoven’s spiritual ideas. She renders Beethoven’s full dynamic palette with nuances that make every shading register. Uchida never makes an ugly sound. Her tone remains warm, colorful, and full-bodied. More important, her interpretation encompasses the inward, contemplative slow sections as well as the energetic ones, and she plays Beethoven’s contrapuntal passages with a clarity that makes every musical strand count. She’s helped by outstanding engineering, too. Not all of the transcendental Beethoven is captured here, but Uchida comes a lot closer than most pianists can aspire to. That alone makes this disc a must-have. -- Dan Davis
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