Festival Music

Steven Isserlis/Robert Levin

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Michael Tumelty

five stars

SOME 24 hours ago, having despatched my review of the first of two recitals by Steven Isserlis and Robert Levin playing all of Beethoven’s cello music, it flitted idly through my mind that I probably wouldn’t hear any better than that magnificent set of performances. I was wrong. I have no idea what fuelled these two players yesterday – Beethoven’s s music, I would guess from a wee speech at the end by an overwhelmed Isserlis – but they were in technical and interpretative overdrive.

Even in the charming starter, Beethoven’s magical Variations on Pamina and Papageno’s Act One duet from The Magic Flute, the character of the music just bubbled up through the wondrous cello and fortepiano playing of these musicians. You could sense the grin on Beethoven’s face as he rounded it off with a touch of whimsical genius: don’t ever let anyone tell you the man from Bonn had no sense of humour.

Then the drama exploded in the second Sonata of the Opus 5 set, with Beethoven’s genius boiling over in an extraordinary display compounded of electrifying silences, a thesaurus of dynamic contrasts and the most terrifying headlong rush into the development section. It was no less that volcanic, and a total re-evaluation of the power and quality of this “early” sonata.

After an interval that we all needed, the music shifted onto a different plane with the two late Opus 102 Sonatas where the glorious team of Isserlis and Levin, as thoroughly intellectual in their structuring of the great masterpieces as they were spiritual in the music’s transcendence, bewitched the capacity crowd into a state of wonder and awe.