Beethoven Piano Sonatas Vol. 1 – Jonathan Biss

There is something almost perverse about beginning a Beethoven cycle the way Jonathan Biss has begun his — not with the op. 2 set, not with the Pathétique, but with a grab bag spanning fifteen years of the composer’s development, as if daring the listener to find the connective tissue himself. Perverse, but revealing too. Biss wants us to hear Beethoven thinking, not Beethoven arriving.

The Piano Sonata No. 5 in C minor, op. 10, no. 1, gets things started with a bang, literally — that opening octave leap wants to knock the wind out of you, and Biss obliges, though his touch stays remarkably clean even at speed. No smearing, no pedal fog. I’ve heard pianists — Gilels came to mind more than once during this disc — who find more granite in the outer movements, more sheer physical menace. Biss is leaner, quicker off the mark, more inclined to let the music’s nervous energy do the talking than to lean on weight of tone. It works. The slow movement is where he really earns his keep. There’s a simplicity to his phrasing here, almost naive on the surface, but underneath it he’s shaping long paragraphs with a sense of harmonic patience that a lot of younger pianists rush past. Beautifully unhurried. The finale scampers by in a blur of mood swings, and Biss catches every lurch without losing the thread — no mean trick in a movement that seems to be actively trying to shake off its own accompanist.

Then op. 22, a work Beethoven himself rated highly, and one performed far less than it deserves, overshadowed probably by its showier neighbors. Biss makes a persuasive case for it as a summing-up, a farewell to a certain kind of Classical-era sonata-writing before the middle-period floodgates open. His first movement has real bite, crisp articulation, no mush in the passagework. The slow movement is where his particular gift for elegance without preciousness shows itself: playing that trusts the music to be luminous without embellishing that beauty. The Menuetto has swing to it, actual charm, though the trio’s odd rhythmic hiccups get their due sting. And the rondo finale is pure Viennese good humor, Biss smiling through the keyboard, so to speak, right up until those darker episodes remind you this is still Beethoven and not Hummel.

The Funeral March Sonata is the disc’s real center of gravity, though — the Piano Sonata No. 12 in A-flat major, op. 26, a work so structurally eccentric (no sonata-form movement anywhere in it) that it practically dares you to underrate it. Biss doesn’t. His booklet note calls it “a lovely and slightly peculiar masterpiece,” and I’d sign my name to that description happily. The variations of the opening movement unfold with unforced grace; you never catch him pushing for effect. But it’s the third movement, the famous Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un eroe, where Biss makes his most interesting interpretive choice. He resists grandiosity entirely. No timpani-roll gravitas, no funeral-cortege weight pressed down on every chord. Instead there’s a kind of hushed, private grief, dynamics kept mostly within a narrow band, the drama internalized rather than declaimed. Some listeners raised on the granitic Backhaus or Schnabel versions of this march might find it underpowered. I found it quietly devastating — Beethoven mourning a hero nobody names, and Biss refusing to tell us who to picture, which somehow makes the loss more universal.

Les Adieux rounds things out, and here the extramusical program — Beethoven’s farewell to his patron Archduke Rudolph as Napoleon’s troops closed on Vienna in 1809 — gives Biss more obvious dramatic terrain to work, and he takes it. The opening horn-call motif, marked “Lebewohl” in the composer’s own hand over the very notes, aches appropriately. The middle movement’s disorientation, that harmonic wandering-in-the-dark quality, comes through vividly. And the finale’s headlong joy at the Archduke’s return has real abandon to it: fingers flying, though never quite out of Biss’s control, which is perhaps the one small reservation I’d register about this whole disc. He is a scrupulously controlled pianist. Even his abandon is measured.

The engineering is warm and true, piano tone caught without excessive resonance. You hear hammers, you hear pedal releases, small mechanical intimacies that remind you a human being is sitting at this instrument. Wisely, nobody has tried to varnish this playing with excess reverb.

Does the disc unseat the classic recorded cycles — Brendel, Kempff, Schnabel for the historically minded, Andsnes for those wanting something more recent? Not yet, not on this first evidence. But Biss doesn’t need to unseat anyone. This is intelligent, unshowy, deeply considered Beethoven playing from a pianist clearly building toward something larger. If the remaining volumes sustain this level of thought, the completed cycle will deserve serious attention. Recommended, with real enthusiasm, and considerable curiosity about where he goes next.