Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms Piano Works – Arrau

There is something almost perverse about listening to Claudio Arrau live, night after night, sonata after sonata, and finding him nearly always recognizable as himself — the same weighty tread, the same refusal to be rushed, the same conviction that a phrase deserves to breathe even if the audience is shifting in its seats. That consistency is either the great comfort or the great limitation of this pianist, depending on your temperament. I have never quite settled the question myself, not in forty years of listening.

These three discs, drawn from recitals in Brescia and Turku across the better part of a decade, will not convert anyone who finds Arrau’s granitic slowness a trial. But for those of us who long ago made our peace with it, who came to hear it as a kind of moral seriousness rather than mere deliberateness, there is a great deal here worth the time.

The Beethoven that opens the set is prime territory. The Piano Sonata No. 7 in D major, op. 10 no. 3, gets a reading whose slow movement turns almost frighteningly inward. Arrau digs into that Largo e mesto until the hall seems to hold its breath, and the scherzo that follows lumbers rather than dances, deliberately so, one senses, a psychological aftershock rather than a lapse of wit. Compare this with his 1960 EMI studio account and the proportions match almost to the second, which tells you something about how fixed his conception of this piece had become by the time he was in his sixties. Some pianists reinvent a work every time they sit down to it. Arrau built a cathedral once and then spent his life walking through the same doors.

The op. 27 no. 1, the Quasi una Fantasia sonata, overshadowed forever by its C-sharp minor twin, comes off rather beautifully here, more spacious than his commercial Philips account, and with an inner voicing that keeps surprising you: little countermelodies surfacing in the left hand like fish rising in still water. I’d rank this among the finer surviving versions, live or studio.

Then the Appassionata, which was practically Arrau’s calling card for half a century. Tremendous control, real heat under the marble. This is not yet the somewhat encased, monumental Appassionata he gave the BBC in 1985, all granite and grandeur with diminishing sparks of danger. Here, in the 1970s, there’s still fire in the middle of the mountain.

Disc two moves to stereo, Brescia 1977, and raises the stakes considerably: the Eroica Variations, op. 35, followed by the last two sonatas, opp. 109 and 111. This is about as taxing a single-evening program as any pianist past seventy might reasonably attempt, and if there are a few finger slips along the way — there are — they hardly register against the scale of the conception. The variations are sharply characterized, each one inhabiting its own little world, and Arrau clearly relishes the joke of the theme’s harmonic bareness before Beethoven builds his fugue on top of it like a cathedral rising from bare foundations.

op. 109 is lovingly done, if you can accept that Arrau is less interested in dramatizing contrast than in finding the long thread of continuity that runs beneath it. The central variation movement doesn’t erupt the way it can in other hands, but the final variations unfold with a spaciousness and dignity that silence complaint. I found myself thinking of his 1975 New York recital on APR, cut from very similar cloth. Whether you want your late Beethoven reconciled or riven by contradiction is, in the end, a matter of temperament, not correctness, and Arrau’s temperament by this point in his life ran toward reconciliation. The retained applause afterward is a minor annoyance; a few seconds of silence to let the sonata’s last chord dissolve would have cost the engineers nothing.

op. 111 closes the disc with a finale taken noticeably tighter than in some other Arrau performances from around this period, the Arietta‘s variations gathering more forward motion than his reputation for spaciousness might lead you to expect. The received idea of Arrau as uniformly deliberate doesn’t hold up under real scrutiny. He shaped tempo relationships across a whole architecture, and sometimes that meant urgency where you least anticipated it.

The Schumann and Brahms of the third disc, from Turku, are the real discographic curiosities here: big, discursive, formally sprawling sonatas that not every pianist wants to tackle, let alone in recital. The Schumann F-sharp minor sonata, op. 11, is a young man’s piece full of Florestan-and-Eusebius mood swings, and Arrau treats its rhapsodic looseness with unusual patience, letting the transitions breathe rather than forcing false continuity onto Schumann’s stitched-together structure. The early Brahms F minor sonata, op. 5, forty minutes of a twenty-year-old composer trying to out-Beethoven Beethoven, with a slow movement inscribed with lines of Sternau’s poetry, receives a rendition of real weight and unhurried conviction, though I confess I’ve heard performances (Curzon’s comes to mind, and more recently Volodos) that find more mercurial contrast in its five movements.

Sound quality tracks the calendar: hissy mono on disc one, tolerable and unobtrusive; stereo, more open and present, by disc two and three. None of it is reference quality, but none of it gets in the way either.

Is this an essential Arrau document? Not quite, if by essential