Festival Music
Steven Isserlis/Robert Levin
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh
Michael Tumelty
five stars
LORD, what a performance from cellist Steven Isserlis and fortepianist Robert Levin of Beethoven’s music for cello and piano, which they are playing complete over two days in the Queen’s Hall: and what an inducement to attend chapter two. The relative neglect of this music baffles me. There are numerous possible explanations. There’s simply not that much of it – only five sonatas and a couple of arrangements. There’s also a degree of bitching, which Isserlis wrote about amusingly in his personal note, describing cellists and violinists as behaving like “cats and dogs” over the amount and value of the music that Beethoven left them. Pianists, of course, would just cite Beethoven’s 32 Sonatas for their instrument and dismiss the others.
But the point is that the five cello sonatas are critically placed, with the two Opus 5 pieces from the composer’s early period, the Opus 69 from the mature middle period and the two Opus 102 Sonatas from the sublime late period. If you wish to hear it, the growth can be traced, as was clear yesterday in Isserlis’s cool, soulful and magically personable accounts of the first opus 5 Sonata and the Opus 69, bristling in the former with daredevil dynamics and Beethoven’s abrupt contrasts, glowing with maturity and confidence in its structure and lyricism in the Opus 69.
The stylistic integrity between Isserlis’ expressive playing, whether light or robust, and Levin’s busy, but clatter-free, virtuosity on his fortepiano was seamless. The absolute delight in the joy of such music-making was enhanced by their inclusion of Beethoven’s Magic Flute Variations, and the composer’s own arrangement for cello of his Horn Sonata.
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