Search - Ludwig van Beethoven, Jenö Jandó :: Beethoven: Piano Sonatas, Vol. 8

Remarkable Achievement

Leslie Richford | Selsingen, Lower Saxony | 12/06/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Jenö Jandó may not have quite the extraordinary class and polish of an Alfred Brendel, but his complete Beethoven Piano Sonata edition is still a quite remarkable achievement, especially for a budget-price label in the first year of its existence (this recording was made in February and March of 1988 at the Italian Institute in Budapest, Hungary). Volume 8 contains five of those sonatas which are seldom heard, all of them having something of an experimental character. Possibly the earliest among them are Nos. 19 and 20 from the 1790?s, two short, easy pieces that could be categorized as sonatinas: brisk, jaunty and entertaining, but nothing profound here. Sonata No. 4 from 1797 is the longest piece on this recording (Jandó needs 28 minutes) and is the exception among Beethoven?s early piano sonatas in being a fully-fledged four-movement sonata with some passages that, although still quite conventional, contain a little promise of the good things to come. There is a good deal more promise in the Sonata quasi una fantasia No. 13, the ?twin? to the Moonlight Sonata. It obviously stands on the brink of Beethoven?s breakthrough to new piano worlds. Sonata No. 22 only has two movements and is generally overshadowed by the Waldstein and the massive Appassionata, but even within this short compass Beethoven is able to produce some surprising effects and show what he could do with a piano, things that probably nobody before him had attempted.



Personally, I enjoyed Jandó?s performance immensely, being only occasionally irritated by his humming and grunts, especially in the Largo of Sonata No. 4. The sound quality is good without being really superb. The only area where I would question this edition is the liner notes by Keith Anderson which contain some biography and attempt to date the sonatas played but give no musical analysis at all and therefore remain overly superficial.

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