Beethoven: Complete Piano Sonatas
Maurizio Pollini
Beethoven: Complete Piano Sonatas
Maurizio Pollini
Maurizio Pollini’s Beethoven Sonatas cycle has reached completion after nearly 40 years.
We celebrate this major event with a handsome 8-CD box set that provides a fitting testimonial to a great artistic partnership between pianist and record label.
The final recordings in the cycle (opp. 31 & 49) are being released simultaneously as a single CD.
Pollini / Beethoven: A story that goes back to June 1975, when Maurizio Pollini began recording the Beethoven Sonatas, starting with two of the last three - op. 109 and op. 110. The remaining Late Sonatas (op. 101, op. 106 and op. 111) followed in 1976 and 1977. Released initially as single LPs, the subsequent 3-LP set won a Gramophone Award.
The story ended in 2014, when the three Sonatas op. 31 and the two of op. 49 were recorded. (Pollini had also recorded op. 31 no. 2, the so-called “Tempest”, before.)
Nearly 40 years to record all 32 Sonatas: Pollini’s is the first cycle on Deutsche Grammophon since those of Daniel Barenboim (1981 - 1984) and Emil Gilels (1972 - 1984, incomplete).
For the release of the box set, the recordings have been arranged by opus number into a compact 8-CD set, with no duplications of repertoire. Although modest in size, the set stands as a monument of artistic achievement, and a remarkable testimony to an artistic partnership that goes back more than forty years.
Review
Lisa MacKinney
Winning the 1960 International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw at the age of 18 kicked off an extraordinary career for Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini. His recording of Beethoven’s piano sonatas began in the mid-1970s with an award-winning reading of the late sonatas, and he only completed the cycle (32 in total) in 2014. Pollini is famous for crisp, clear precision, a dazzling technique and lightning speeds, but never to the point of obfuscating the emotional intensity of these magnificent works. He has been accused of clinical intellectual detachment, but even a cursory listen to the Adagio sostenuto movement of the ‘Hammerklavier’ and the opening movement of the ‘Moonlight’ render such assessments ridiculous. Pollini’s ‘Appassionata’ is particularly noteworthy, and I have never recovered from seeing him perform it at Carnegie Hall in 2013, during which I was on the edge of my seat. This is a masterful set that is both an excellent starting point and an essential complement to other core cycles. And priced at $64.95, it’s an absolute steal.
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