Beethoven Piano Duets – The Hamann Sisters

Beethoven wrote relatively little for piano four-hands, and what he wrote has never quite captured the imagination of the recording industry the way his solo sonatas or chamber music have. That neglect is partly understandable — these are, with one enormous exception, early or occasional pieces, and even the most devoted Beethovenian can be forgiven for not knowing them cold. But that exception matters enormously. The piano transcription of the Grosse Fuge is one of the strangest, most stubborn, most magnificent things Beethoven ever put on paper, and any serious account of it demands attention.

What the Hamann sisters have done on this Grand Piano release is unusual enough to be worth pausing over. They play the complete piano duet music twice — first on a modern Yamaha concert grand, then on a period fortepiano, each instrument in an acoustic suited to its nature. The Yamaha sessions were recorded in a concert hall; the fortepiano in a smaller, more domestic space. It sounds like a gimmick. It isn’t.

The fortepiano changes everything, and not always in the ways you’d expect. That instrument — softer in attack, quicker to decay, its bass register almost muddy by modern standards — strips these pieces back to something closer to what Beethoven’s contemporaries actually heard. The Grosse Fuge in particular becomes a different argument on period instruments. It loses some of its terrifying mass. What you gain instead is clarity of line, an almost desperate transparency — you can hear exactly what Beethoven is doing contrapuntally, every inversion, every augmentation laid bare, and the effect is disconcerting in its own way.

The Hamanns play with real pungency. They push tempos consistently faster than the competition — the Bryant/Rachmanov account on Naxos, which also uses period instruments, sounds positively ruminative by comparison. Their Grosse Fuge on fortepiano is a full three minutes brisker, which is not a small difference in a piece of that density. Whether this is always the right call is debatable. There are moments in the Sonata in D, Op. 6, where a little more room to breathe would not go amiss — that opening Allegro molto can sound effortful rather than buoyant when pressed. But more often the sisters’ forward momentum feels earned rather than imposed, a genuine conviction about rhythmic propulsion rather than nervous energy.

Beethoven himself took these pieces seriously, which is worth remembering. Two carry opus numbers he authorized. He was genuinely furious at publishers who treated the Waldstein Variations and the Grosse Fuge as disposable merchandise — the same publisher who stuck an alternative finale on Op. 130 without much ceremony. That Beethoven cared should tell us something.

The Op. 6 Sonata, usually the odd man out in collected editions of the piano sonatas, is genuinely charming — not much more than that, but charm in early Beethoven has its own particular freshness, a kind of pre-Promethean ease he would largely abandon. The Hamanns give it exactly the right weight: affectionate but not indulgent.

The Naxos rival from Bryant and Rachmanov has the virtue of including duet works by Beethoven’s teachers — Haydn, Albrechtsberger, Neefe — which gives it documentary appeal. But it offers only one pass through the Beethoven, and the playing, while thoughtful, lacks the crackle the Hamanns consistently generate. As a side-by-side comparison of what the same music sounds like across two centuries of piano-making, this new release is close to unique in the catalog.

The Hamanns are making only their second commercial album. You wouldn’t know it. There’s a self-possession here — a willingness to commit, to have an opinion about a phrase and follow it through — that takes some pianists a career to develop. Whether they will sustain this in repertoire that demands more weight and complexity than these pieces require, we’ll have to wait and see. On this evidence, the wait seems worth it.