Beethoven: Last Piano Sonatas

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You may disagree with details of his performances, but there's no mistaking his intelligence, or the mastery of his pianism...These rewarding and thought-provoking performances have been very... — BBC Music Magazine, May 2011, 5 out of 5 stars More…

Release Date: 21st Mar 2011
Catalogue No: ZZT110103
Label: Zigzag
Length: 65 minutes

Excerpt, Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109

Work length19:14

$3.05

$4.55

Alexei Lubimov

I. Vivace

Track length6:35

$1.00

$1.50

II. Andante molto cantabile ed expressivo

Track length12:39

$2.05

$3.05

Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 31 in A flat major, Op. 110

Work length20:22

$4.50

$6.80

Alexei Lubimov

I. Moderato cantabile molto expressivo

Track length6:27

$1.00

$1.50

II. Allegro Molto

Track length2:33

$1.00

$1.50

III. Adagio ma non troppo

Track length3:45

$1.00

$1.50

IV. Fuga Allegro ma non troppo

Track length7:37

$1.50

$2.30

Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111

Work length26:22

Album only

Alexei Lubimov

I. Maestoso

Track length9:21

$1.50

$2.30

II. Arietta (Adagio molto semplice e cantabile)

Track length17:01

Album only

About
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About

Alexei Lubimov’s 2010 disc of Impromptus by Schubert was praised in the press. During the same recording session in Haarlem in July 2009, Alexei Lubimov continued with the last three sonatas of Beethoven, Beethoven’s musical testimony which he plays with all the mastery of a great russian pianist, "a kind of russian Pollini" (Alain Lompech, Diapason).

“They must be played ‘uncomfortably’, ‘intangibly’; nothing in them reveals itself, nothing ‘plays itself’, and one must take enormous pains to ‘elucidate’ the text for oneself… these sonatas are divorced from the keyboard instrument itself… as if the musical content of these sonatas ‘disregards’ the instrument to hand, overcoming its material nature and its historical characteristics… I felt still more strongly how astonishing, how unusual the compositional material is and how tenaciously Beethoven seeks to consolidate, extend, and transform for his own idiosyncratic purposes the forms and structural principles he inherited from his predecessors.” Alexei Lubimov

Alexei Lubimov belongs both to the great Russian tradition of pianists such as Richter and Gilels (he was the one of the last pupils of Heinrich Neuhaus in Moscow) and to the generation of Early Music pioneers that includes Gustav Leonhardt and the Kuijken brothers. He is also a leading interpreter of such modern composers as Denisov, Schnittke, Silvestrov and Arvo Pärt.

With this triple cultural background, Alexei Lubimov has pursued an exceptional international career. In 1968 he was in Brussels to play Denisov when he met the Kuijkens. He gave the first performances in the USSR of John Cage and Terry Riley. In the 1970s he founded the Moscow Baroque Quartet, the first Soviet ensemble of its kind, with which he rediscovered the Baroque repertoire on period instruments. This was followed in the 1980s by the creation of the avant-garde Alternativa festival in Moscow and a modern and historical keyboard class at the Moscow Conservatory. Alexei Lubimov is also professor of fortepiano at the Salzburg Mozarteum.

Reviews

May 2011

You may disagree with details of his performances, but there's no mistaking his intelligence, or the mastery of his pianism...These rewarding and thought-provoking performances have been very well recorded by Zig-Zag Territoires.

19th February 2011

The challenges may be forbidding but the rewards are huge...He has clearly thought long and hard about this music: without softening its strange juxtapositions and impulses, he makes sense of Beethoven’s elusive logic, and thus captures each sonata’s integrity and greatness. His magisterial grasp of the Op.110 finale is especially impressive

April 2011

Lubimov's masterly pacing of the last three pages of [Op. 110] is the most convincing that I have ever heard...[in Op. 111] the changes of register and the subtle colourism seem to transport us to another world - and with trills that would make even Michelangeli envious. In short, I recommend this disc very highly. It ranks with the finest accounts of these sonatas on any instrument.

24th February 2011

Lubimov uses an instrument made two years after Beethoven's death because of the tonal range it offers, and he exploits those keyboard colours, the evenness of the tone and the articulacy of its lower registers quite wonderfully, allowing him to shape his playing without a trace of self-consciousness. It's a totally enthralling disc.

The Independent on Sunday 10th April 2011

The percussive delicacy of his 1828 Graf fortepiano emphasises the curious mixture of playfulness and reverence in the E major Sonata, while embracing the A flat Sonata's symphonic ambition. In the C minor Sonata, heart and mind are torn between the gravity of the work and the beauty of Lubimov's musicianship. A thrilling dilemma.

Beethoven: Last Piano Sonatas

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