This release presents all the music Beethoven wrote for piano during his last seven years, including the last three sonatas, the Diabelli Variations, the Op. 119 and Op. 126 Bagatelles, and five obscure small pieces without opus number. Anyone who essays these works on disc faces decades of competing recorded versions from virtually all the 20th century’s great Beethoven players. Jean-François Heisser’s stylish but matter-of-fact traversals of the E major Op. 109 and C minor Op. 111 rarely proceed beyond pleasant efficiency. We miss the surging dynamism, dramatic tension, and spiritual depth that Beethovenians so disparate as Rudolf Serkin, Claudio Arrau, Artur Schnabel, and Richard Goode have brought to these works. The scampering, cryptic qualities inherent in the Bagatelles, for instance, are pacified and smoothed out under Heisser’s careful fingers. Heisser, however, turns in one of the most refreshing, sharply characterized, and unerringly paced Diabelli Variations in recent memory. The pianist maximizes contrasts between movements through tight, continuous links between certain variations, while creating a hushed, sustained momentum in the three variations leading up to the culminating fugue and menuetto. But is a first rate Diabelli Variations worth the purchase of an uneven, full-priced two CD set?
