Search - Ludwig van Beethoven, John Lill :: Beethoven: The Complete 32 Piano Sonatas

John Lill's Beethoven Sonatas: Big, Physical, Hearty, Intell

Dan Fee | Berkeley, CA USA | 04/21/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Wow. This complete set of the Beethoven piano sonatas by John Lill is just the real deal, hands down. Now re-released at a budget price on Brilliant Classics, there is simply no real reason not to consider buying this set for your fav shelf. My bets are you will hang onto it for the long term. (A hint: Don't loan this set to friends. You will never get it back.)



Why?



Well, let's start with the big, generous physicality of Lill's seemingly endless keyboard Wizardry. To judge from the sheer athletic presence that comes across in this set, Lill must have two of the larger hands now playing among us. Like, say, Rachmaninov (or Brahms, or Andre Watts, or ???), Mr. Lill sounds like he has a simply fabulous reach. Thus, there is never the slightest hint in his playing that he cannot encompass the implicit span of the notes at any speed he adopts. His Beethoven playing has a fluency that never falters, bedrock, solid.



The pianist's physicality means that he is a Beethoven player who belongs to the tight and clean camps. He never tries to do with pedaling what he cannot do with touch. He never suggests through blur or smear or lurch or scamper in any range of his keyboard what he cannot surmount and command aurally through, fingers, hand, forearm, or shoulders and back. Think Wilhelm Backhaus, or Kempff (Wilhelm, too). This is Beethoven according to Weingartner or Toscanini or Szell.



But the big, tight, sure-footed, clean physicality is not the whole end of Lill's playing. Since he apparently does not have to worry about getting the notes, his generous mind and heart are free to re-create and engage with what Beethoven is saying in these many pages of all the 32 sonatas. Per the accounts of Beethoven's contemporaries, the great composer was a master improviser at the keyboard, par excellence, and proved it before the public audiences in Vienna before he went deaf and stopped playing in public. Mr. Lill is so musically immersed in the Beethoven world of human experience that all his sonatas have just slopping buckets of this omni-present vitality, free, improvised. There is always a sense of wide-open spaces in this playing. A sense of what people who live in North America or Africa or the Russias or South America might just call, Big Country.



The amazing thing is, we hear no hint of contradiction in Lill's playing, between the tight and clean legacy and the free improvisatory liveliness.



Take tempo as an example. Tight and clean for Lill simply does not have to mean, loud and fast and nothing but. His introduction to the first movement of the eighth sonata, Pathetique, is as deliberate as can be, and absolutely rock steady, too. You could probably set your watch by it, but that would miss the point of the tempo. The wonderful and marvelous things about this slow tempo in the Pathetique is that this slowness can still breathe, can still move. You have to think back a ways to remember this sort of thing among conductors. Finally one's mind settles on Kurt Sanderling, or Otto Klemperer in his late golden summer of recordings. A wise teacher will ask you, where are you playing from? Where are you playing to?



A slow tempo for Lill as a Beethoven player is not a dead one, then.



Big-boned yet free at the same time, Lill offers us Beethoven the humanist and free-thinker. What mind. What heart. What earthiness and wit. As there is a plentiful sense of improvisation, so, too, we can hear a profound sense of imagination in this Beethoven. What feeling for humanity, the tool-using creature who plays, who makes things up right on the spot. Who makes up quite intelligent things, right on the spot.



Now, let's turn to keyboard dynamics. But briefly.



The problem for pianists is partly that the piano is as much a percussive instrument as a sustaining, stringed one. How else could Bartok have shown us the two-piano sonata's kitchen pots genius of hammering?



So what happens in Lill's Beethoven, to rhythm? It stays alive and crisp, for starters. Lill does not stint one passing whit on the Sforzando punch that Eugen Jochum once said was the key to all good Beethoven. But this sforzando is never dull or heavy, and Lill never plasters it on from outside the music. Instead, the sforzando hits up from inside the phrasing of the moment and always rides the flow of the rhythm and melody and harmony, regardless of whether the tempo is fast or medium or slow. It all sounds so very easy. But it is indeed difficult, and we listeners cannot take any of this magic for granted.



Both right hand and left hand, Lill never stops surfing the Beethoven wave. How dazzling is this composer, held so expertly in this player via all the good arts of musical phrasing. As player, Lill can highlight or focus a melody or motif as well as Charles Rosen ever thought of doing, but he never tears holes in the larger fabrics of the greater musical paragraph. Thus Lill gives us a sense of Beethoven, coherent. Doing this through sections or tempo-contrasted parts of movements is startling enough, but carrying it right through whole movements is even better and more life-giving. Sparkle on, then, through all the phrases.



Another aspect of Lill's whole is Beethoven's harmony. Thanks to his free and open manner, we often hear the harmony as part and parcel of the composer's endless, humanistic intelligence and technical inventiveness. Whether the music continues for a while longer in the same key of the moment, or darts smartly away into another, we are encouraged to keep taking delight, right along with the composer. The shifting keyboard textures are manifestations of Beethoven's harmonic genius, too.



Get it? Get this set, then."

Thrilling, pure, and deeply satisfying!

Richard Camhi | Switzerland | 02/04/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Lill's identification with the music of Beethoven is astounding! Through purely musical values, he makes everything both comprehensible and immeasurably vast. Beethoven had a mind comparable to Einstein's - only a very few people could really understand this cosmic expression, ever. Lill lets us in!"

Astonishing audible sensitivity

xul | milky way galaxy | 06/21/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Including the pre-natal phase when my beloved mother played them to me, Ludwig van Beethoven's piano sonatas have accompanied me as ever faithful friends and guides during nearly 60 years. I would not trade all the past, present and future political speeches for even one movement of one sonata. 4 complete sets of them played by 4 pianists form parts of my CD library.



The other 3 pianists have great merits. However, in my humble opinion John Lill excels in communicating intimate sensitivity to the messages of these magnificent works. For example, listen to the first movement Allegro of Sonata No. 10 in G Major Opus 14 no. 2."