Beethoven Complete Piano Duets – Amy and Sara Hamann

Two sisters. One score. Twice through, on instruments separated by more than a century of piano-building, and the gap turns out to be the whole point.

Amy and Sara Hamann have hit on something more useful than a novelty. Beethoven’s music for piano four hands is a corner of the catalog most listeners never visit — no Appassionata thunder here, no Waldstein Sonata bravura, just chamber music for two people crowded onto one bench, elbows occasionally colliding, four hands negotiating who gets the tune. It is Beethoven relaxed, or as relaxed as he ever got. The Hamanns recorded the whole shelf of it twice: once on a modern Yamaha grand chosen for brightness rather than warmth, and again across three fortepianos modeled on instruments from 1784, 1800, and 1815.

The revelation is the early Sonata in D, op. 6, written in 1797 when Beethoven was still learning how to sound like nobody but himself. On the Yamaha it comes out plump, assured, weirdly premonitory. You catch yourself thinking of the late A major sonata, op. 101, the harmonic thinking already reaching forward. Get the Hamanns onto the Stein-model instrument from 1784 and the piece snaps back into its own decade. This is contemporary with Haydn’s last piano sonatas, with something of Mozart’s four-hand sonatas for Nannerl still audible underneath. The action is shallow, the tone dry and a little nasal, sustain almost nonexistent — chords don’t bloom, they just stop. Fortissimos turn genuinely raw, even ugly at the loudest moments. But inner voices that vanish into pedal-haze on a modern instrument climb up into the light. You hear Beethoven’s counterpoint the way he probably imagined it: thinly scored, exposed, a little dangerous.

That word — dangerous — matters for the Grosse Fuge arrangement, op. 134, Beethoven’s own reduction of the last movement of the String Quartet No. 13, made in 1826 when he needed the money and the publisher needed a piano version to sell. On modern piano it is monumental, granite-faced. On the fortepiano from around 1815, twiggier and drier in sound, the Hamanns take it at a clip that should not work, something like fourteen minutes, brutally fast for a piece this knotted. It works anyway, because the instrument cannot sustain the wall of sound a Steinway or Yamaha throws up. You hear it as fugue again, as argument, voices chasing rather than colliding. I’ve heard the two-piano and duet versions of this piece treated as a curiosity, an afterthought to the quartet. The Hamanns make the case that it is terrifying on its own terms.

The Waldstein Variations, WoO. 67 — nothing to do with the sonata, just a shared dedicatee, Count Ferdinand von Waldstein, Beethoven’s early patron in Bonn — get real wit in both versions, though the joke lands with a sharper edge on the older instrument, where the comic hesitations in the final variation have nowhere to hide acoustically. The three Marches, op. 45, composed for the imperial princesses at the Hofburg and rarely programmed by anyone, dance with genuine snap on the 1800 fortepiano. That instrument has a crispness of attack, almost percussive, that the Yamaha smooths into something closer to a military band recording.

None of this would matter without musicians willing to think differently at each keyboard, rather than transplanting one interpretation twice. The Hamanns don’t. Balances shift. Tempos shift by a hair. Phrase-endings get pointed differently depending on how long a given fortepiano can hold a tone before it dies. That’s real scholarship, not just good engineering, and the booklet, generously annotated, tells you which of the three historical instruments serves which work and why.

Do you need both discs? If you already own a favorite modern disc of the piano four-hand repertoire — there aren’t many; this is thin territory compared with the symphonies or quartets — the historical disc alone justifies the purchase. But hearing them back to back, as the Hamanns clearly intend, is the more instructive experience, and possibly the more enjoyable one too. I came away thinking less about which piano I preferred and more about how thoroughly the instrument shapes what we call Beethoven’s style, how much of what we hear as “early” or “late” Beethoven is really just early or late piano technology talking. Recommended, and unusually so, for anyone who thinks they already know this music.