Music
Catherine Manson/Alasdair Beatson, Cottier's Theatre, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
five stars
THE Cottier Chamber Project's decision to run a cycle of Beethoven's 10 Violin Sonatas over two years has been seminal. Cycles of the Piano Sonatas are common: in recent years there have been cycles of the 32 sonatas in Perth and Edinburgh. There's another running in Glasgow as I write. All the string quartets have been done in Edinburgh and Perth, with, again, another survey running in Glasgow, and concluding this year. (String Trios next, please?) But the 10 Violin Sonatas don't seem to have the same currency. Yet they are just as vital to Beethoven's output; which makes the Cottier's two-year project, concluding this week, the more defining.
And what has made the Violin Sonatas survey more significant is the way it has been done. Violinist Catherine Manson is a great Beethoven violinist, especially in her comprehensive mastery of period-style playing, which gave her performances of the first and last sonatas, respectively, on Tuesday night an exhilarating quality, and an extraordinary subtlety and sophistication. But the real winning stylistic feature of her playing of both pieces, for me, was that she is no slave to purism: what Catherine Manson is not, categorically, is an extremist: if a note needs warmed, she'll coax it, and ever so gently: you won't even think of it as application of vibrato: it's just a warming, and as subtle as a caress. And the ravishingly-fluid and unforced pianism of Alasdair Beatson, especially in their miraculously-refined performance of the Tenth Sonata, generated a continuum of beauty in sound and structure that left me in a state of wonder. Listen out for it on Radio 3.
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