Classical reviews: Beethoven and Medtner

Steven Osborne gives a heart-stopping performance of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas, while soprano Sofia Fomina’s artistry is gracefully refined on the Medtner CD

Sofia Fomina performs Medtner’s songs (Alecsandra Raluca Dragoi Photography and Olga Martinez Designs)

Beethoven: Piano Sonatas

Steven Osborne, piano

Hyperion CDA68219

★ ★ ★ ★★

Steven Osborne, who has just turned 50, has a scope that stretches from Schubert and Stravinsky to Crumb and Feldman, and he is celebrated for his super-refined Debussy and Ravel. He brings that refinement to the variations of Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 109, letting them grow to majestic proportions before returning to the cantabile simplicity of the theme. And he takes Beethoven’s performance direction “con amabilita”(“with charm”) as his cue for the first movement of Opus 110, playing so quietly and with such restraint that it feels as though lost in a dream - then letting the earthy energy of the drinking song crash in as a rude incursion.

The rest of this sonata comes in carefully calibrated chiaroscuro, as Beethoven’s colourings modulate from subfuse greys to a final blaze of light. After a mighty and full-blooded account of the Opus 111 Allegro, he gives both the jazziest performance of the variations I have ever heard and also one of the most heart-stopping in their ultimate finality. Beethoven saw this work as his farewell to the piano sonata, and that is what Osborne’s playing tells us.

Medtner Songs

Sofia Fomina, soprano, and Alexander Karpeyev, piano

CHAN 20171

★ ★ ★ ★★

The pianist and composer Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951) was born in Moscow and remained in Russia until well after the revolution, but he was unpersoned by the Soviets thanks to his choice of exile in Britain – he settled in Golders Green. Like his friend Rachmaninov, he composed in a late-Romantic style which cut no ice with the musical modernists whose gods were Schoenberg and Stravinsky, but unlike Rachmaninov he lacked the charisma to make a career as a virtuoso pianist. Even today he remains a shadowy presence, so this fine new CD of his songs will help redress the balance.

These settings of poems by Pushkin and others are exquisite, and Sofia Fomina’s artistry is gracefully refined. As Francis Pott, author of the liner note, aptly puts it: Medtner’s voice is “peculiarly, poignantly, the autobiographical voice of memory, of looking on in one’s own life from without”.