The Beethoven sonata cycle Daniel Barenboim recorded for EMI between 1966 and 1969 always struck me as the product of an artist attracted to the measured tempos and rhetorical breadth characteristic of pianists like Claudio Arrau and Wilhelm Kempff, but lacking these older masters’ focus and discipline. For example, there’s little shape and rhythmic definition in the way Barenboim drags out the C minor sonata’s introduction, while the Rondo’s tiny phrase distensions seem superimposed from without rather than organically intuited. However, Barenboim admirably sustains the slow movement, even if his tone nearly disintegrates in the softest passages (the pianist’s DG remake is markedly faster and more firmly projected).
In Op. 27 No. 2 Barenboim appears to have exchanged the hackneyed opening movement’s “Moonlight” for a candelabra, as one too many delayed downbeats make clear. The ambling middle movement lacks the profile and linear clarity that distinguish Barenboim’s DG remake–and I vastly prefer the latter’s finale to EMI’s, where Barenboim’s uneven articulation, pounded-out accents, and rushed passagework truly represent “world-crass” standards.
Similarly, the “Appassionata” heaves and lurches all over the place and is chock-full of blotched phrases and more than a few wrong notes, although the pianist pays closer attention to Beethoven’s quick-change dynamic markings than you’d suspect on first hearing (unfortunately, he omits the important repeat in the finale). Granted, the music’s improvisational impulse easily can withstand this type of interpretation, yet again the older Barenboim generates equal excitement with greater expressive economy on DG and, to a lesser extent, on his live 50th anniversary EMI rendition. A bonus DVD offers the live 1995 Beethoven Choral Fantasy with Barenboim conducting the Berlin Philharmonic from the piano. This is the same performance coupled alongside the Triple Concerto with Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma, already available on DVD (EMI 4 01473 9 3), and it beats out the younger pianist’s crude Westminster traversal and sluggish collaboration with Klemperer.
