Beethoven Piano Sonatas – Yundi

Thirty years old and already rebranding himself — just “Yundi” now, no surname, like Cher or Madonna, or for that matter Horowitz, who never needed one either. The gesture tells you something about the ambition behind this disc. Here is a pianist who conquered the Chopin competition at eighteen, charmed the Liszt repertoire into submission, and has now decided that it is time to stake a claim on the three sonatas that every piano student in the world learns before they’re out of short pants.

Everybody knows the Pathétique. Everybody has an opinion about it. Schnabel, Kempff, Richter, Gilels, Pollini, Goode, Brendel on three separate occasions — the ghosts crowd the room before a note sounds. Yundi does not sound crushed by them. He sounds, mostly, like a pianist who has decided to trust his fingers over his historical conscience.

The opening Grave wants gravitas — the word is embedded in Beethoven’s own title, Grande sonate pathétique, and he was not a composer given to idle superlatives. Gilels finds in those opening bars something almost orchestral, a weight of utterance that makes the silence after each chord ring with implication. Yundi’s chords speak, certainly, but they don’t quite toll. There’s a brightness to his tone, a certain high sheen off the top of the sound, that works against the funereal character Beethoven wants here. When the Grave returns later in truncated form, it doesn’t accumulate the dread it should.

Once into the Allegro di molto e con brio, though, this is a different story. The tempo is urgent without being hysterical, the left-hand tremolandos have real bite, and there’s an unforced sense of architecture. The Adagio cantabile is the disc’s loveliest surprise: no syrup, no indulgent rubato, just a long, singing line played with the kind of unaffected simplicity that’s much harder to achieve than it sounds. I thought of Clara Haskil, oddly. The finale has real wit, almost mischief, articulated with a crispness that avoids the thumping literalism some pianists bring to this rondo.

The Moonlight is trickier terrain, mostly because of what listeners bring to it rather than what’s in the score. Beethoven called it Sonata quasi una fantasia; he did not call it Moonlight — that was the poet Rellstab, decades after the composer’s death, and the nickname has turned a strange, formally radical work into mood music for candlelit dinners. Yundi’s first movement avoids the usual sin of over-pedaling, keeping the triplets clear even as the damper blurs the harmony. The second-movement “Allegretto”, that odd little interlude Liszt called “a flower between two abysses,” is perhaps too polite here, lacking a bit of rhythmic snap. But the finale, the Presto agitato, is genuinely exciting — fast, clean, dangerous-sounding without ever actually going off the rails. The arpeggios in the development have a coiled, predatory energy.

It’s the Appassionata, though, where you discover what kind of Beethovenian this pianist is going to become, assuming he keeps at it. This sonata does not forgive superficiality. It demands a pianist willing to sound occasionally ugly, occasionally violent, because Beethoven’s anger here is not decorative. Yundi’s account has power — the finale goes like a house on fire — but I missed a certain tragic undertow in the first movement, the sense of something being wrestled with rather than simply played. Richter’s famous recordings, wayward tempo choices and all, understood that this music is dangerous. Yundi’s is thrilling but, I think, still a touch safe.

None of which should discourage a listener from buying this disc. It’s beautifully recorded, intelligently paced, free of the exhibitionism that mars some young virtuosos’ first ventures into German repertoire. But it confirms rather than overturns what the Chopin and Liszt recordings already told us: here is a pianist of real sensitivity who has not yet found, in Beethoven, the thing he found so naturally in Chopin — that sense of inevitability, of a single sustained idea driving a whole movement from first bar to last. He’s thirty. There’s time. I’ll be curious to hear him try these works again at fifty.