Hummel, J: Piano Sonata in F minor Op. 20

“While tone is fragile compared to a modern grand, the colours are striking. …Max chooses more moderate tempos than many on disc… Her expansive approach allows the pulse of the F minor Sonata's opening, for example, to flex expressively within Hummel's own sudden tempo changes. Best is La contemplazione, a 'little fantasia'. Its serene opening includes charming dialogue between the upper and bass, while the middle section's shifting tonalities support alluring lyricism.” BBC Music Magazine, January 2010 ****

“…the skill of Hummel in his exploitation of the keyboard is consistently impressive, bringing together Mozartian manners and a vein of Romanticism. Susan Alexander-Max, playing on a reproduction fortepiano of the period, is a most persuasive interpreter. It would be easy to make this music sound boring and conventional but she brings out the underlying liveliness, reflecting the impact that this music in the composer's hands made on audiences.” Gramophone Magazine, February 2010

“Stephen Hough's splendid issue is in its way as revelatory as his Gramophone Award-winning recordings of the piano concertos. He revels in the element of display which Hummel, one of the leading pianists of his day, must have brought out in his own performances.
These three works are arguably the most interesting of Hummel's nine solo sonatas.
The most radical is No 5, with the composer in 1819 enthusiastically throwing himself behind the new romantic movement. A strikingly angular opening motif leads to an argument which, in a very free rendering of sonata form, brings surges of energy set against moments of reflection; there are many unexpected melodic and harmonic twists and few passages of conventional figuration, such as those that weaken the piano concertos.
The slow movement, too, opens surprisingly, with a heavyweight fortissimo gesture, before settling down to a yearning melody, anticipating Chopin's Nocturnes but more bare in texture, with cantilena echoing bel canto opera.
The finale is a wild Slavonic dance, fierce and energetic in headlong flight, again dotted with unexpectedly angular ideas.
In the Sixth Sonata in 1824 Hummel was rowing back from the romantic stance of Op 81.
The first movement establishes a much lighter tone and is more conventional in structure, exceptionally clear in its presentation of sonata form. The opening theme, for all its lightness of texture, has characteristically quirky twists, and leads to a warmly lyrical second subject, rather like Weber. The second movement Scherzo, the most striking of the four, is a fast mazurka, leading to a slow movement rather like a Mendelssohn Song without Words and a virtuoso finale, light in texture at the start and ending, after all the display, in an unexpected throwaway cadence.
Sonata No 3 in F minor, dating from 1807, again starts gently before developing quirks typical of Hummel. The slow movement then surprisingly has the marking Maestoso, majestic, strong and forthright rather than conventionally lyrical, leading to another virtuoso finale, relatively brief, with cross-hand, Scarlatti-like leaps for the left hand.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010