The complete Beethoven piano sonatas started by Louis Lortie just before the pandemic resumed Thursday evening at Bourgie Hall after many postponements caused by the closing of the halls. A restart that promises.
Posted at 7:00 a.m.
Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas is about 10 hours of music to get into the performer’s head and fingers. A challenge for any pianist.
But Louis Lortie is not “everything” pianist, he who studied with a pupil of Artur Schnabel, himself a disciple of Leschetizky, who had himself worked with Czerny, a pupil of Beethoven. The Quebecer has already engraved the complete cycle at Chandos, but also on video for Medici in 2020 in a mostly empty Bourgie hall.
The pianist did not choose a strict chronological approach for the whole of the complete, some concerts mixing sonatas from different periods of the composer’s life.
We were thus able to hear Thursday evening – in this order – three early sonatas (those of opus 7 and opus 14), opus 31 noh 1, composed after the turning point of the Testament of Heiligenstadt – Beethoven’s deep crisis linked to his deafness –, and a sonata of great maturity, that known as the “Adieux”, opus 81a.
The musician does not skim over the scores: he knows them like the back of his hand. The technique is sovereign, even in the most athletic movements like the finale of the “Adieux”.
Some may even have found certain passages too muscular, in particular the beginning of the Sonata noh 4 in E flat major, opus 7, whose hammered bass makes the great Bösendorfer lend for the complete sound roar and quickly saturates the small vessel of the former Erskine and American church. But Lortie is also capable of an ineffable sweetness, as evidenced by the beginning of the last movement of the same score, of an infinite tenderness.
A slight relaxation
For the rest, the pianist is halfway between the great romantic tradition of Gilels, Arrau and company, and iconoclasts like Kovacevich or Gelber, who seem to reinvent these scores recorded many times each time.
The slow movements are always very felt, with, again, a sound of the great days. The andante of the Sonata noh 26 in E flat majoropus 81a, “Les Adieux”, played more “adagio” than “andante”, do not however forget the indication espresso. Ditto for the corresponding movement of opus 7.
Another remarkable element in Louis Lortie: the ability to properly characterize the musical material, far from the tyranny of the metronome.
One thinks of the first movement of the Sonata noh 9 in E majoropus 14 noh 1, where the second theme, more lyrical than the turbulent initial theme, is played with a slight relaxation which gives us time to appreciate it.
The artist somehow does the opposite in the Sonata noh 10 in G majoropus 14 noh 2, performing the first theme of the opening allegro with a certain indolence, then speeding up a bit as the second theme, in D major, comes along.
At other times, Lortie’s signature signals itself more discreetly, but just as effectively, as in a precise place in the first movement of the Sonata noh 16 in G majoropus 31 noh 1, where the pianist emphasizes just enough the change from major to minor mode. Where, in other sonatas, certain notes subtly lengthened in order to signal to us discreetly the thousand beauties of these scores and to give more flexibility to the sentence.
The integral continues at the same place on October 16, 18, 19 and 20.