Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 8, 14 & 15

Album review

German public services are throwing out recordings, often produced in the best acoustic conditions with first-rate sound engineers, always at the leading edge of technological progress. The result of a merger between SWF (Südwestfunk) and SDR (Süddeutscher Rundfunk) in 1998, SWR is pursuing a thrilling policy of publishing its archives through its own label, SWR Music, which has enriched our knowledge of a number of great artists of the previous century.
It's important to make the distinction between live recordings, made in the heat of a public concert, and studio recordings made for the requirements of radio programmes, which are almost identical with those made for commercial records, with their heaps of repeated takes and precise editing.
Paul Badura-Skoda's huge recording back-catalogue gives an idea of his versatility and his extraordinary skill in adapting to whichever instrument he is playing at a given moment. Here, he has used a modern piano to record these three sonatas by Beethoven, in 1955 and 1962 and his expressive palette is second to none. After a first movement steeped in melancholy in the famous Clair de lune, we follow him down the pathways of the imagination in the Pastorale which he plays with an almost-conversational fluency, which sets the tone for the entire musical discourse. The treatment of the Pathétique which follows is still heavily marked by the "Sturm und Drang" which was prevalent in the later 18th century, to which this famous score belongs. © François Hudry/Qobuz