Beethoven Violin Sonatas – Szeryng and Haebler

There is something faintly poignant about hearing a violinist near the end of his road playing the Beethoven sonatas as if he still had all the time in the world. Henryk Szeryng died suddenly, in Kassel, in 1988, on tour, still working. These performances with Ingrid Haebler come from that last, unhurried stretch of his career, when the fingers still obeyed but the temperament had settled into something closer to reminiscence than declaration.

Szeryng’s whole biography reads like a lesson in the odd routes a career can take. Born Henryk Serek in Warsaw, one of Carl Flesch’s most gifted Berlin pupils in the years before the deluge, he might have had the trajectory of a Grumiaux or a Milstein. Instead the war scattered him. He ended up teaching and performing in Mexico, hardly a crossroads of the international circuit, and stayed there for decades, eventually acquiring Mexican citizenship and, more improbably, the quasi-diplomatic title of Ambassador of Goodwill, a distinction he apparently enjoyed reminding people of when the mood struck him. It took Arthur Rubinstein, touring through Mexico and hearing a fellow Pole play, to pull him back into the first rank. That encounter produced years of joint recitals and, eventually, the famous Rubinstein-Szeryng traversal of the Beethoven sonatas for RCA. This Haebler set is a different animal entirely: later, quieter, less about partnership-as-institution and more about two colleagues simply making music together.

Haebler is an interesting choice of partner, and not an obvious one. Her Mozart credentials are beyond dispute, her touch famously pearled and unforced, but Beethoven has never been thought her natural terrain in quite the way it was, say, Backhaus’s or Kempff’s. That reputation doesn’t entirely hold up here. She brings something valuable to this repertoire, an unwillingness to bang, a chamber-player’s ear for balance, even if her fingerwork occasionally betrays an odd seam between staccato and legato, most noticeably in the first movement of the Kreutzer, where the joins show.

Szeryng’s playing across this disc confirms what listeners always knew and occasionally held against him: the sound itself is gorgeous, the vibrato a model of controlled, unfussy warmth, the intonation nearly flawless even in the murkier upper reaches of the fingerboard. What you sometimes miss is danger. He rarely startles you. In the Sonata No. 5 in F major, the Spring, this reticence works beautifully. The first movement unfolds with an unforced, almost conversational ease, accents present but never barked, the whole thing scrupulously clean without turning cold. The slow movement breathes properly, Szeryng varying his dynamics with real subtlety, and the finale is where the two players truly lock together, their tempo relationship so instinctively judged you stop noticing there are two people playing at all.

The early Sonata in A major, op. 12 No. 2, gets an unforced charm from both of them. Nobody strains to make more of this modest, Haydnesque piece than it wants to be, which is itself a kind of wisdom.

The Kreutzer is where reservations creep in. This is a sonata that wants some confrontation, some sense of two virtuosos squaring off. Beethoven wrote it, after all, with a dedication near-namesake to the volcanic Rodolphe Kreutzer, who reportedly never played it, having found it unplayable, or unbearable, depending which account you believe. Szeryng and Haebler give a reading that’s neither small nor especially combustible, a middle path that occasionally tips into caution. The opening movement’s rhythmic profile feels curiously slack, weighted down rather than driven, though to Szeryng’s credit he never once buries Haebler in the concertante exchanges, a real virtue given how many violinists treat this sonata as a covert concerto with unwanted piano accompaniment. The variations movement fares better. Haebler’s opening statement is idiosyncratic, maybe over-articulated, but she does something genuinely rewarding with the left-hand melodic lines beneath the variations, bringing out inner voices too many pianists let vanish into pedal haze. And there are moments of real astringency from Szeryng here, flashes of the steel that the rest of the disc mostly keeps sheathed.

Measured against the classic urgency of Oistrakh and Oborin, or the combustible Perlman-Ashkenazy accounts, this Kreutzer will not unseat anybody’s first choice. But nobody buys this disc for a definitive Kreutzer. They buy it, or should, for the Spring Sonata’s easy conversational glow and for the chance to hear a violinist whose sound had lost none of its bloom, playing with a colleague attentive enough to meet him exactly where he lived, in refinement, not combat. Recorded with clarity and reasonable warmth, decently annotated. Not an essential Kreutzer. A rather lovely Spring. Worth having for that alone.