Exploring the Epic: Beethoven’s Last Sonatas and the Power of Interpretation

2023-08-06 03:01:00

Beethoven and Laundress. A meeting in which the power of the composer and the judgment of the interpreter invariably come together towards some form of epic capable of making history an interesting challenge. On Friday, at the National Auditorium of the Kirchner Cultural Center, Horacio Lavandera offered a program articulated with the last three sonatas by Ludwig Van Beethoven: number 30 in E major Op. 109, number 31 in A flat major Op. 110 and number 32. in C minor Op. 111.

It was another technical and temperamental feat that one of the outstanding Argentine pianists of this time managed to carry out on the music of a composer he knows well and to whom he always returns. It is enough to remember, for example, when in 2017, on the same stage of the “Whale”, he knew how to play and conduct the five piano concerts in the same weekend. Or when he included four sonatas in the same program at the Konex Festival that year.

On this occasion, the technical difficulty and emotional commitment was added to the symbolic weight of works that decidedly marked other directions for European civilization, even beyond music. Lavandera addressed the three sonatas in a single stroke, without pauses between one and the other, to try to outline the arc of an era in which music also reflected the passage from the ancient to the modern, the transition from the feudal to the capitalist world. . A feat that the pianist accomplished with the complicity of silence, except for some inopportune telephone and a few untimely applause, from a packed room.

the three blows

If it is possible to establish three periods in Beethoven’s production – the classical, the heroic and the late – and also to endlessly discuss when one begins and another ends, there is no possible speculation regarding the belonging of these three sonatas: they represent the greatest find of a composer back from everything, on the edge of himself and the world around him. The unredeemed revolutionary in the shadow of restoration. A deaf man who listened to infinity.

Composed between 1820 and 1822, around the Solemn Mass, the Diabelli Variations and the Ninth Symphony, the sonatas 30, 31 and 32 represent open doors towards the followinglife, the coherent crowning of a work that in its permanent vibration never ceased to announce unprecedented sounds, daring experiments and a disruptive expressive universe. Without falling into the naturalistic narrative typical of Romanticism, the hero finished taking Classicism, pure matter, to that form of weathering that is the world when he does not fully understand.

Received with a standing ovation, following briefly presenting what he was regarding to play and asking the audience to remain silent until the end, Lavandera began his recital with “la 30”. The pianist approached the first movement with an elastic and legato sound, although allowing himself to certain romantic cuddling, lightnesses that immediately took shape in the brilliant and austere Presto of the second movement, before approaching the final variations with classical distance.

Having found the right point of Beethovenian density, “La 31” was a display of technical skills, on which Lavandera also managed to put good moments of music. He traversed the labyrinthine lines of the complex piano plot, always attentive to the details of the phrasing and the dynamic design that ends up giving shape to what many consider to be the most beautiful of the Beethovenian sonatas. Carefully lyrical in the Moderato cantabile molto espressivo of the first movement and without stressing and forcing what the brief Allegro of the second deserved, Lavandera managed to clearly render the polyphonic plots of the third movement with a distinguished mournful gesture that never conceded to pathos. The Adagio ma non troppo – Allegro ma non troppo was one of the great moments of a night that had the best in the end.

Between myth and literature, “La 32” is articulated in just two movements: a Maestoso that accommodates the sonata form and the fugue in unprecedented imagery, and the Arietta, which develops a long metamorphosis towards the end in dissolution. With more music than literature, Lavandera lived up to the myth, she brought into play her immense range of resources to offer a very good performance, greeted at the end, now yes, with a long standing ovation.

“This is the first time I’ve done this,” said Lavandera, thanking the applause in reference to what she had just played. “This concert should have been a little later, but they advanced it to me. I just landed in Buenos Aires and I come from doing another repertoire, ”said the pianist, who in this recital did not play from memory, as he usually does. It is possible to think that with more filming on this program he might have rounded off the orchestral dimension that decidedly sustains the piano writing of this late Beethoven, and that at times it became blurred in what was, in any case, an exceptional display of talent.

“Now yes, applaud whenever you want”, the pianist blurted out at the end and a generous dose of encores began which, from between Clara Wieck and Richard Wagner, culminated with a superb version of the “Fire Dance”, from El amor brujo by Manuel From Fault.

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