Louis Lortie’s concert at Bourgie Hall on Wednesday, the fourth of his journey through the Sonatas by Beethoven, obviously culminated in the Sonata No. 29, “Hammerklavier”. But what about the other four on the program and what’s the point?
This is our first experience of a Beethoven marathon as such: a string of sonatas to complete a complete. And as much to say it frankly, we found it totally inane. In degree of interest it easily equaled seeing a ” nerd » align by heart the first 50 decimals of the number Pi.
What is the problem ? The impression of attending a sports evening (quite the opposite of art) in a discipline, “integrity”, born industrially in an artificial way in the 20th century and which has nothing to do with relevant lighting serving the works, the music and its understanding.
In the same mold
In this case, Louis Lortie unrolled a fairly standard soundtrack on Wednesday, willingly resonating in an athletic and tense speech with strong hard and tense. All this certainly led to the hammer keyboardbut to the detriment of Sonatas No. 24almost sloppy, and #25, better but too violent compared to his friendly casualness. The whole gait, devoid of grace, held a kind of minerality, as if everything had to anticipate theOpus 106.
But, and this is the ineptitude of the exercise, in 1809, at the time of the Sonatas Nos. 24 and 25we are very far from it: it is not the same Beethoven, it is not the same strong, it is not this tension and tension. Nor is it in the “feeling and expression” of the 27th Sonata. All these singularities are passed through the mill of the process, the sporting challenge and the lapidary impatience. The unfolded style is more suitable for the 28th Sonata, op. 101 that we count in the group of the “last”.
But here we begin to ask ourselves another question: why did you summon a Bösendorfer, a piano reputed to be rather “tender”, to violate him like this? A question to which the hammer keyboard will be far from answering…
Obviously Louis Lortie was waiting to show himself in his best light in “his” hammer keyboard. As much as the first part of the concert seemed strangely impatient, so was the 1st part of the sonata. With the slow movement it’s as if the serious things were beginning: millimetric dosage of the pedal, hierarchy of dynamics, luminous highs, admirable phrasing and then a final fugue (4th movement) intractable, implacable.
It’s true that we came for that. But it is obvious that in absolute terms, a program with, for example, a Partita of Bach, the pause and the 29th Sonata would have had a much stronger impact allowing the pianist to manage his influx and his priorities, fully and artistically. As experienced yesterday, with uneven, undifferentiated, chained and smoothed music, the exercise is therefore indeed akin to the ineptitude of aligning the first 50 decimals of the number Pi by heart.