There is a moment in the first movement of Dussek’s Sonata in f-sharp minor, op. 61 when the harmony simply dissolves — not modulates, not pivots, but dissolves — into something that has no business existing in 1806. You brace yourself, you lose your footing, and then you realize that’s exactly the point. Dussek called it Élégie harmonique, and the title is not merely decorative. This is grief as harmonic argument, and the argument goes places Schubert wouldn’t dare for another decade.
The occasion was the death of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, killed at the Battle of Saalfeld in October 1806. Dussek had followed the prince from battlefield to battlefield — an odd life for a pianist, stranger still that it produced music this raw. Louis Ferdinand was no mere patron; he was a serious artist, and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 bears his name in dedication. When Dussek sat down to mourn him, something uncorked. The sonata writhes. It takes harmonic turns that sound less like Clementi’s world than like early Scriabin. Whether that’s genius or accident, I couldn’t say with certainty — but it doesn’t matter. The music holds.
Olga Pashchenko plays it with imagination and — the word keeps coming back — haunting is right. She studied with Alexei Lubimov and Richard Egarr, which means she comes to period instruments with serious credentials, and she’s chosen her tools carefully. For the Dussek and the Beethoven bagatelles she plays an 1812 fortepiano by Donat Schöfftos, a name I confess I couldn’t place before encountering this disc. The instrument has a reedy, slightly spectral quality in the middle register that suits the Dussek perfectly — all that tonal darkness, that sense of something not quite resolved. It gets clanky at fortissimo, which you notice, but in this repertoire fortissimo isn’t really the point.
The Beethoven bagatelles, op. 33, get less attention than they deserve. These are early Beethoven — composed around 1802, before the Eroica changed everything — and they carry the fingerprints of both worlds: the Haydn-Mozart inheritance still audible, the new voice still finding its edges. The C-major Scherzo in the set has always seemed to me to look forward with uncanny specificity toward Schubert’s “Great” Symphony in c major — that particular rhythmic lurch, that sudden innocence — and Pashchenko’s reading makes the connection feel less fanciful than usual. On this instrument, the textures stay transparent even when she pushes.
The second half of the program moves to an 1826 Conrad Graf — and what a difference. The Graf is warm and full, with a singing treble and real depth in the bass octaves. It’s the kind of instrument that makes you understand why Brahms kept one around, years past its practical relevance, because he simply loved the sound. Pashchenko uses it for the Beethoven Sonata in c minor, op. 111, and for Mendelssohn’s Variations sérieuses.
The op. 111 is, of course, the summit everything on this disc is climbing toward. Its two movements — the compressed, almost violent Maestoso-Allegro and the immense Arietta with variations — represent Beethoven leaving the classical world so far behind that the romantic era could barely keep him in sight either. Pashchenko’s account is serious and considered; she doesn’t rush the arietta’s celestial trills in the final variations, letting them accumulate their strange luminosity at something close to their own pace. There are a couple of technical slips — nothing career-defining, but noticeable — and in the Allegro she occasionally lets the momentum go slack at phrase endings. Still, she has the measure of what this music requires. That’s not a small thing.
The Mendelssohn variations close the program with a kind of retrospective clarity. op. 54 is Mendelssohn at his most rigorous — he wrote it for an album in aid of the Beethoven monument in Bonn, which tells you something about the company he meant to keep. Pashchenko’s playing here is at its most accomplished: clean passagework, well-shaped phrases, and a genuine command of the instrument’s dynamics. The Graf responds beautifully.
The album’s title, Transitions, signals its ambition — to map the blurring boundary between classical and romantic, with Dussek as the uncanny figure who seems to have crossed it decades early. The programming is genuinely intelligent. That Dussek sonata alone makes this disc essential; everything else earns its place.
