Yevgeny Sudbin BEETHOVEN Sonatas Op. 110 & Op.111 - Bagatelles Op. 126

Yevgeny Sudbin has previously recorded Beethoven’s piano concertos – releases which have received international acclaim, for instance on the website ClassicsToday.com: ‘A Beethoven experience you will not want to miss.’ For his first disc featuring solo works by Beethoven, Sudbin has chosen the two final sonatas and the Six Bagatelles, Op. 126 – late works written between 1821 and 1824, just a couple of years before the composer’s death. There are numerous anecdotes that testify to the fact that Beethoven was highly temperamental. But in his liner notes to this disc, Sudbin writes of another, contrasting side to the composer: ‘warmth, generosity and wisdom – with unexpected outbursts of cheeky humour – are also unmistakably among Beethoven’s qualities and particularly evident in the works on this recording’. 

If Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas form one of the most important collections of works in the history of music, then the final ones belong to his crowning achievements. Various musicians and musicologists have commented on them, hearing a hard-won triumph of the spirit in the great fugue of the final movement of Op. 110, and interpreting Op. 111 – and especially its second movement, the famous Arietta – as a last farewell. The set of Bagatelles was composed only months after Beethoven had completed his monumental Ninth Symphony. It became the last work for piano to be published in his lifetime, and together the six brief pieces form a distillate of a lifetime of writing for and playing the piano.

Tippet Rise OPUS 2017 Daydreams

Tippet Rise OPUS 2017 is the second compilation album to emerge from the summer music season at Montana’s Tippet Rise Arts Center, which features performance spaces of acoustic perfection amidst a sculpture-laden terrain of awe-inspiring beauty, nestled against a backdrop of the Beartooth Mountains near Yellowstone National Park. From the PENTATONE Oxingale Series, Tippet Rise OPUS 2017 inhabits the sphere of Daydreams, a sculpture by Patrick Dougherty where natural saplings organically emerge out of an eroding schoolhouse.

In this whimsical, imaginary world, composers open a visionary portal to the past and future. In the jazz-infused FIRST CLUB DATE, a world premiere by Aaron Jay Kernis and a Tippet Rise commission, cellist Matt Haimovitz and pianist Andrea Lam illuminate the musical playground of a boy on the cusp of manhood. The new work is dedicated to Haimovitz and the composer’s cellist-son Jonah, with double-entendre movement titles like “Puppy Love” and “Matt’s Monkish Machinations.” Violinist Caroline Goulding and pianist David Fung embody the youthful spirit of George Enescu’s Impressions from Childhood, while a pastoral mood reigns in Eugène Bozza’s Image for solo flute, performed by Jessica Sindell. An epic expansiveness saturates Red Arc / Blue Veil by John Luther Adams, featuring electronics and a wide array of sounds from pianist Vicky Chow and percussionist Doug Perkins. Opening the album is Jeffrey Kahane’s hopeful America the Beautiful, performed on piano by the composer himself, while works by Chopin and Bach, performed by pianists Yevgeny Sudbin and Anne-Marie McDermott, anchor the program with their sheer beauty and virtuosity. (PENTATONE)

Yevgeny Sudbin / Minnesota Orchestra / Osmo Vänskä BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto 3 - MOZART Piano Concerto 24

“It’s weird”, I thought, before listening to this album, “Mozart’s Concerto No. 24 and Beethoven’s Concerto No. 3 are very similar, but you rarely see them together on an album.” Then I listened and realized why: they are, in fact, so similar that playing them back-to-back creates a risk of burnout, even in performances as good as these.

They’re both in C minor. Their opening themes sound a little alike. They both trade in grand heroism, with plush slow movements and turbulent finales. Listening to them together, you get the very strong impression that Beethoven was keeping close to his source.

Yevgeny Sudbin helps this along by turning up the dial a little bit in the Mozart, and dialing a little back in the Beethoven. The cadenzas, which he wrote himself, provide the standout moments: the first Mozart cadenza is overtly Beethovenian, including, at 12:40, a deliberate quote of the opening melody from Beethoven’s third concerto. The Mozart finale’s cadenza includes a short (abortive?) fugue of Sudbin’s own devising, which is surprising and a little harsh, while the first-movement cadenza in the Beethoven concerto contains the most breathtaking playing on the whole CD.

The Minnesota Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä are perfect, almost too much so, reminding me of my criticism of these forces’ symphony cycle: that it sounds like Beethoven played by well-engineered robots. That cycle had many fans who will love this. I can say, though, that the woodwinds - particularly clarinets - make beautiful sounds in the Mozart larghetto, full of Viennese elegance.

Some critics have noted that Sudbin makes the simplest passages (runs, trills) into the greatest pleasures. This is true. His playing is so precisely voiced, and so crystal-clear, that it’s hard not to be enthralled by passages which, to other pianists, are the busy work. This alone would make the recording a standout. The cadenzas add interest, and most of you will probably like the coupling and orchestra more than I did. Recommended in the expectation that time will increase my appreciation for the musicianship here. (Brian Reinhart)

Yevgeny Sudbin / Minnesota Orchestra / Osmo Vänskä BEETHOVEN Piano Concertos 4 & 5

With this release Yevgeny Sudbin and Osmo Vänskä launch their Beethoven concerto cycle in a novel and intriguing fashion. Going in at the deep end with the most lyrical and magisterial of the concertos, Sudbin makes it clear that he has little use for Beethoven weighed down, as it were, with excess baggage, with the heft and earnestness of a more conventional view. Instead, his delectably light-fingered brilliance and virtuosity shines a new light on some of the most familiar scores in the repertoire, making a supposed division between Mozart’s Apollonian and Beethoven’s Dionysian genius seem little more than a cliché.

True, listeners used to a greater intensity and expansiveness may balk at the nervy rapidity of Sudbin’s reflexes, recalling the greater ease and breadth of past masters of the Beethoven concertos such as Gilels or Arrau, or the more speculative or interior stance of, say, Radu Lupu. But if Sudbin occasionally suggests “time’s winged chariot hurrying near”, the mother-of-pearl sheen of his pianism is backed by a special underlying sensitivity. In the grandest of Beethoven’s two cadenzas for the Fourth Concerto, Sudbin’s spine-tingling pace takes him close to the edge; but hearing him in the phantom entry to the Emperor Concerto’s finale reminds you that you are listening to a wholly individual artist. Such mercurial pianism keeps Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra on their toes but they follow their soloist as to the manner born. BIS’s sound and balance are excellent and the rest of this cycle is eagerly awaited. (Bryce Morrison - Gramophone)

Yevgeny Sudbin / Tapiola Sinfonietta / Osmo Vänskä BEETHOVEN Piano Concertos 1 & 2

Let me lay out information first of all: this is the conclusion of Yevgeny Sudbin’s cycle of the five Beethoven concertos that began, back to front, with an issue of Nos 4 and 5 together (4/11) and continued with a coupling of No 3 in C minor with the Mozart C minor Concerto (No 24), K491 (5/14). Osmo Vänskä has been the conductor throughout, with the Tapiola Sinfonietta here and previously with the Minnesota Orchestra. I note for now that the first CD was received with enthusiasm and was an Editor’s Choice; the next, in which No 3 was paired with the Mozart, fared less well.

It is impossible to hold back from admiration for Sudbin in whatever he plays, thanks to his brilliance and hallmark exuberance. He has much to say and he wants us to listen. You may feel the hyperactive style he brings to the outer movements of these concertos is just what they require. I am not so sure. The exuberance, for me, tips over to a cat-on-hot-bricks manner that too often seems a default position and wearisome. ‘Halt,’ I want to cry, ‘couldn’t you please occasionally calm down a bit?’ Need sforzato accents always be like touches of a whip and scales the length of a piece of string? Vänskä and the orchestra are willing partners. I resist too their bass-heavy sound world, built around microphone placements, which projects a nervy, fidgety view of dynamics in which a level is rarely sustained for its full term. Try the opening of the C major Concerto (No 1) – marked pianissimo until a crescendo leads into the first fortissimo at bar 16 – as an example of what I mean. To me, this is so much more exciting if the very quiet martial energy at the beginning is held taut. It’s the sort of detail a great conductor with a major orchestra and demanding soloist will agree upon and get right.

Oh dear, I’m sounding grouchy. I want the prospect of admiring Sudbin as much in Beethoven as in Scarlatti and Scriabin; but it is not there. He is sparky and generous with impulses and good ideas, but restless. The Largo of the C major Concerto, the longest slow movement in all the concertos, shows how the best of ‘early’ Beethoven is every bit as characteristic as the later, with an appreciation, in this instance, of the clarinet and solo writing for it that he never surpassed. I treated myself to Sony Classical’s box of Sviatoslav Richter’s complete live and studio recordings for RCA and Columbia; seek it out if you can for the performance he gave with Charles Munch and the Boston SO of this concerto in November 1960. Yes, from way back, I know, but incomparable.

Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny remarked that the master ‘brings out difficulties and effects on the piano that we could never have imagined’. Yevgeny Sudbin at his best is an artist capable of reminding us of that and there is plentiful evidence in these rondo finales. Don’t get me started on his cadenzas. They ignore all the material Beethoven left for Concerto No 1, which he finds wanting in various ways, playing in the first and last movements cadenzas of his own (‘based on Friedheim’). Suffer them if you can; I couldn’t possibly comment.

There’s a mistranslation in the booklet of the German note which makes a nonsense of where the cadenza comes in the first movement of the B flat Concerto (No 2). (Stephen Plaistow / Gramophone)