Beethoven : Sonates pour piano n°1, 2 & 3 (Cycle Beethoven, Vol. 2) (Michael Korstick)

Album review

This disc is the second in a new cycle of Beethoven's piano music by Germany's Michael Korstick; the first disc, curiously, contained the Diabelli Variations, Op. 120. Getting down to the sonatas themselves, Korstick offers unusually detailed readings of the first three. He strikes the difficult balance between maintaining the strong ties of these works to Mozart and (especially) Haydn, and reading into them the formal innovations to come. Korstick realizes that Beethoven's radical formal thinking made itself felt at first in small details. His touch at the beginning of each of the outer movements is light; the Piano Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 2/2, is played particularly straight and naïvely, without a hint of the abruptness it is usually given. But Korstick's neutral beginnings are meant to give him room to draw a picture of the young Beethoven pushing at the walls. Each movement develops in a distinct trajectory that brings out all of Beethoven's experiments, and those experiments are treated less as examples of rough humor (although there's still humor aplenty) than as moments of questing after new frontiers of sound. Each movement, by its end, has become a fully formed and assertive individual. The slow movements are notable as well; here Korstick strives for a quiet expressiveness and avoids the conventional feel that plagues even some very famous recordings of these works. Combined with his formidably clean playing, Korstick's attitude results in a genuinely fresh reading of the first three sonatas. It whets the appetite for more, especially with the trademark Dieter Oehms engineering that keeps the focus squarely on the performer.
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