Beethoven - Piano Sonata 14 'Moonlight' [Kovacevich]
I hate these huge boxed sets of the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas, which i only have a tendency to listen to a few Sonatas from, the other end of the scale are these one disc surveys, which are kicked out to cover all the Sonatas, and again i hate filling up my disc racking with a dozen single discs to be some sort of completist, there's a fine middle ground which suits me, and that's to buy the odd disc from the odd Artist, it works for me, it frees up collecting Beethoven's early Sonatas, which i find are really quite weak, and allows me to delve into Sonatas i like, collecting the more exciting Sonatas in abundance, this is one such disc, some famous works, alongside some middle period Sonatas that may seem like trifles, 19 & 20 are really short, but there's something about their brevity which is really appealing, this is one of the better issues from Kovacevich.
Stephen Kovacevich is American, he's now 72, and he recorded this disc in 1999, the images throughout have the theme of the moon [using the idea of the 'moonlight' Sonata], of course Beethoven never named his Sonata the 'moonlight', so of course it's got nothing to do with the music, but i like the visuals, the actual disc itself is a complete moon, the booklet cover shows a grainy shot of the moon, the colour theme is all dark / light blue, even on the white areas of the back inlay, you can see a sort of 'map of the moon', i like the layout, the small blue lettering is great, and of course the EMI logo adds a dash of colour to the whole thing.
The first movement is tremendous under Kovacevich's hands, it's easy to get the tempo wrong, too slow and it drags, too fast and you lose the heavenly poetry, i think Kovacevich gets it about right, maybe just a tad slow in places, the opening sounds just right, full of gravitas, it's very hypnotic, it's halfway through that close attention to speed and volume has immense paybacks, towards the end there's a section where some of the most delicious accidentals descend down the keyboard [4:59-5:26], and then the bass plays the melody like some grief laden tolling [5:30+], a great finish, and an inspired close, listening to this again was so good.
Here's Daniel Barenboim playing the first movement on YouTube.
