The final installment of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s Haydn sonata cycle offers an inspired mix of early and late works in equally inspired interpretations. How does one begin to describe this pianist’s all-encompassing mastery?
I’d start with the C major Fantasia, where Bavouzet’s bracing basic tempo and subtle shifts in voicing give vivid life to the music’s boundless inventiveness. Then I’d take lyrical respite in the F major Adagio’s gorgeously spun cantabiles and Bavouzet’s sophisticated finger legato.
The Capriccio in G major may be based on a song about eight men castrating a wild boar, yet you’d never know that from the composer’s elegant passage-work and the pianist’s pointed finesse. An Allegretto in the same key (originally for musical clock) features some of the most feathery and ear-tickling trills on disc. At first Bavouzet’s simple and direct way with the C major Variations seems pleasantly uneventful, yet his muted tone in the minore Variation Five suddenly catches you by surprise.
Similar care and detail informs the sometimes slighted early sonatas, while Bavouzet brings out the cross-rhythmic implications in the later D major Sonata No. 61 second movement without overdoing the accents. Although the E-flat Sonata No. 62 hardly lacks for great recordings, from Horowitz to Hamelin and dozens in between, Bavouzet’s stands out for his astute attention to the smallest rhythmic values and all matters of articulation: for example, the pianist is not afraid to intensify and even roughen up his portato phrasing in some of the slow movement’s unaccompanied melody lines.
Now that Bavouzet has brought this project to a triumphant conclusion, I hope that Chandos will box up all 11 volumes of what now constitutes the reference Haydn sonata cycle on a modern concert grand.
