Beethoven Violin Sonatas – Kavakos and Pace

There is a moment in the slow movement of the Kreutzer Sonata — the theme-and-variations that Tolstoy never bothered to mention, preferring the sheer animal heat of the opening presto — where Enrico Pace lets a single chord decay almost to nothing before Leonidas Kavakos re-enters. It takes nerve to leave that kind of silence in a release session, where the temptation is always to fill the acoustic. They don’t fill it. They trust it. That trust is the governing principle of this whole cycle.

Beethoven did not conceive these ten works as violin sonatas in the way the nineteenth century came to understand the term. The title pages of the early ones read “Sonata for Piano and Violin” — the keyboard first, the string instrument a partner rather than a soloist with accompaniment. History has been unkind to that billing. Generations of virtuoso fiddlers — Heifetz chief among them, with the estimable but perpetually subordinated Brooks Smith at the keyboard — turned these into vehicles, occasions for tone production and swagger, the piano reduced to furniture. Kavakos and Pace seem to have actually read the title pages.

Pace is not a name that gets thrown around the way Argerich’s does, or Ashkenazy’s. He plays here with an unshowy command that anchors everything. Listen to the first movement of the D major, op. 12 no. 1 — the untroubled Allegro con brio that opens the whole cycle — where his articulation has a Mozartean cleanliness, each sixteenth note weighted just so, never blurred by pedal. Kavakos brings a tone off his 1724 “Abergavenny” Stradivarius that is bright without glare, silvery, precisely centered. Intonation so accurate it almost disappears as a variable, freeing the ear to listen past pitch to phrasing.

What you will not hear here: portamento, swooning rubato, the kind of hothouse vibrato that turns the A minor Sonata, op. 23, into pre-echoes of Brahms. What you will hear is a classicist’s clarity applied to music that stands, chronologically and stylistically, at the hinge between Haydn’s world and Beethoven’s own furious middle period. The op. 30 sonatas — written in 1802, the year of the Heiligenstadt Testament, though you’d hardly guess the composer’s despair from these three works’ outward poise — come off superbly. The C minor, op. 30 no. 2, is the finest thing in the set: turbulent, tightly wound, the two players locking into Beethoven’s obsessive rhythmic cells with an intensity that had me thinking, not unfavorably, of Kremer and Argerich’s classic DG account. That’s not a comparison I make lightly. Argerich in this repertoire is a force of nature; Pace works by different means, subtler, less combustible. But he and Kavakos generate real heat by the coda.

The Kreutzer, inevitably, is the calling card of any such set, and at over thirty-eight minutes this is a spacious, unhurried reading — no interest in the barnstorming, race-to-the-finish approach some duos take. The famous opening Adagio sostenuto, with its unaccompanied violin gesture answered by the piano, unfolds with real gravity here. The ensuing Presto has bite but never turns merely athletic. I missed, once or twice, the sheer wildness that Kreisler or the young Perlman brought to this page — the sense of two players nearly losing control of the machine. Kavakos never loses control. That is both the strength and, if you want a quibble, the limitation of this whole traversal.

The Spring Sonata, op. 24, is a particular pleasure. That opening melody floats here with an almost vocal quality, phrased with a Schubertian sweetness in the first movement that gives way to genuine Mozartean wit in the scherzo. The contrast with its dark companion piece, the A minor op. 23 — composed in the same year, published as a pair, yet worlds apart in temperament — comes through vividly in this sequencing. The late-arriving G major Sonata, op. 96, from 1812 and dedicated to the Archduke Rudolph, gets a reading of unexpected tenderness; its wide-open textures and long silences suit this duo’s temperament.

BIS’s engineers deserve credit too. The balance is well judged, piano and violin occupying real, believable space rather than the violin-forward mix that afflicts too many rival sets.

Does this displace Kremer/Argerich, or Perlman/Ashkenazy, or the still-treasurable Francescatti/Casadesus originals? Not entirely — there are individual movements elsewhere with more abandon, more risk. But as an integral cycle, thought through with unusual intelligence and genuine equality between the two players, this Kavakos/Pace set belongs on the same shelf. High recommendation, without reservation about the partnership, and only the mildest about the temperature.