For the most part, Volume 5 of Gerhard Oppitz’s uneven Beethoven cycle finds the pianist on top form in the three Op. 31 sonatas: inspired, engaged, and at one with the music’s message. He shoves your nose into the G major first movement’s obsessive “kerplonky” syncopations, and lights a hotfoot underneath the difficult-to-control arpeggios, marking the sly harmonic surprises through color rather than rubato. The Adagio grazioso is full-throated and generous, with strong padding from the left-hand accompaniment. Oppitz’s measured tread and rounded off phrasing in the Allegretto doesn’t seem in character with the rest of the performance; it’s as if Oppitz’s one-time teacher Wilhelm Kempff dropped by to relieve Artur Schnabel.
The D minor “Tempest” sonata features an unrelenting, tightly controlled finale, an opening-movement introduction milked for maximum contrast, and a central Adagio where Oppitz seems unwilling to play really softly. In the E-flat sonata, look at Oppitz’s matter-of-fact Allegro as a warm-up to his marvelous woodwind-like articulation of the Scherzo and warm, flexibly phrased Menuetto. The Presto finale’s basic pulse occasionally unglues when the left hand plays alone, but Oppitz never lets the tempo run away. Why does Hänssler continue to serve up blurry, indistinct, “wrong end of the telescope” engineering for this cycle?
