Murray Perahia brings a master’s touch to Beethoven

OVER a 45-year recording career American pianist Murray Perahia has carved out a unique niche and he now turns his attention to some groundbreaking Beethoven.

London-based concert pianist Murray Perahia has recorded two of Beethoven’s groundbreaking sonatas.

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OVER a 45-year recording career which takes in almost 100 albums and three major labels, American pianist Murray Perahia has carved out a unique niche in the world of classical music.

Mentored by such luminaries as Rudolph Serkin and Vladimir Horowitz — a friend who he would visit and play to in the great maestro’s final years — Perahia’s rise through the ranks has been meteoric until he is now considered among the greatest interpreters of both Mozart and J.S. Bach, whose French suites he chose as his debut album for Deutsche Grammophon, with whom he signed from Sony in 2016.

But it’s his other great love, Beethoven, who is the subject of his sophomore album with the Yellow Label, and he chooses two disparate groundbreakers in the titanic Hammerklavier Sonata No 29 and the much-loved Moonlight — the 14th of the canon of 32 works.

The composer must be much on the London-based pianist’s mind these days as he is currently editing an Urtext version of the sonatas, and although he has recorded a fair few of them over the years this new release will be considered a landmark recording by many music lovers.

Murray Perahia's new album with Deutsche Grammophon.

Perahia brings to these familiar pieces all the distilled wisdom and a lifetime’s study and performance. This is his first recording of the Hammerklavier, so we have nothing from his earlier interpretations to compare it with, but he did record the Moonlight in 2008 when he gave the opening a diaphanous flowing quality taken at quite a lick.

Ten years later he has pegged it back in tempo, giving it more bones and a nobler and more poetic hue.

This more substantial approach also brings into contrast the two movements which follow the famous opening. The delicately dancing allegretto — more like one of his famous bagatelles than a middle movement — and the agitated finale, often played too stormily for this listener, but not with Perahia in charge. Every note counts and he manages to give just the right amount of weight to counterbalance the first movement.

But it is the mighty Op 106 sonata that excites on this album. Perahia says in an interview in the liner notes that Beethoven predicted that 50 years later people would still be trying to get to grips with its innovative qualities. The long slow third movement — “one of his saddest”, Perahia says — which then transitions miraculously into the complex fugue finale, a movement that “could sound modern even now”.

There have been may great recordings of this work, but this new one immediately thrusts itself into the forefront.

It is to be hoped that Perahia intends to give us more of the Beethoven sonatas over the next few years. They are the pinnacle for any pianist, containing so much that one complete set in a master performer’s lifetime is barely enough.

You can get Murray Perahia’s Beethoven Sonatas from Fish Fine Music for $24.99.