In Beethoven’s C minor and F major Op. 10 sonatas, Maurizio Pollini’s superbly drilled fingers play up the energetic brio implied by the composer’s fast tempo markings for the outer movements. At the same time, the pianist’s militant drive rarely evokes the music’s brash wit, failing to bring out the sly humor in Beethoven’s strategically deployed silences (as Gould and Hungerford successfully do, with brilliant insouciance). Op. 10 No. 3’s slow movement is a model of scrupulous note reading and dynamic control–yet where’s the singing impulse, the tenderness, the anguished expressive world that Arrau, Fischer, Schnabel, Kovacevich, and, yes, even Horowitz reveal?
Following a cool, rather matter-of-fact introduction, Pollini launches into the center of the “Pathétique” sonata’s first movement with equal diffidence, save for his unusual stressing of the grace note in the second theme. While the slow movement also yields square and detached results, the Rondo is as elegant and poetically turned out as we could wish. The engineering’s hollow patina and blurry resonance hardly match the clarity and full-bodied impact of Pollini’s late-Beethoven sonata recordings from the 1970s.
