Festival Music

Rudolf Buchbinder

Playfair Library Hall

Michael Tumelty

Four Stars

AT the eighth and penultimate concert of Rudolf Buchbinder’s Beethoven Piano Sonatas marathon, in the splendid Playfair Library Hall on Tuesday evening, Buchbinder was hitting the nail on the head with greater fluency and consistency than he has done regularly, both in terms of programming and performance.

The programming was clever: it moved from a kind of childhood world, through another world of organisation through experience, and into yet another sphere where, with the experience now intrinsic, the composer can let go, more liberated and openly emotional in his expression.

Buchbinder opened with Beethoven’s two perfect miniatures, the tiny opus 49 Sonatas, proceeded to the big-boned opus 22 Sonata, an impressive character piece, though not particularly an experimental Sonata, and then, from all that childlike innocence and classical structuring, the Viennese pianist ploughed into the darkest, angriest F minor and the Appassionata Sonata, a piece where Beethoven really vents his spleen and frankly blows his top.

Now Buchbinder, as I’ve felt over the last two weeks, is not really a man for blowing his top; he’s a bit too understated for that: perhaps that’s the Viennese way. But while I didn’t feel exactly as though I had received a good kicking in this Appassionata, which is the way it should be – never was a sonata more aptly nicknamed – Buchbinder went a very credible three rounds with those thumping Fifth Symphony rhythms; and he really did wallop them; on top of which the turbulence he unleashed in his storming, furious account of the volcanic finale had me quaking, and his audience roaring for more.

Ends