Description
By far and away darkest sonata of the Romantic period. Schumann famously wrote of the Op.35 that “…calling it a sonata is a caprice, for he has simply bound together four of his most reckless children, thus under his name smuggling them into a place into which they could not else have penetrated.” In a way, Schumann is exactly right: there is probably no Romantic sonata so weird, disjoint, and unsatisfying as this one. But this criticism is also meaningless, because the whole *point* of this work is to disturb.
On one level, Chopin is using the sonata as a framework to draw together some of his major conceptions: a ballade, a scherzo, a funeral march, and a prelude/etude, with a nocturne or chorale embedded in each of the first three movements. The prevailing mood is morbid. Consider the final movement: understated, disintegrative, bordering on atonality, without harmony, without melody, without decoration, without inflection, without pause. It follows on naturally from the march, a work whose ascetic sonorities recall Mussorgsky more than anything else. The scherzo is a motoric struggle built from relentless sequential development, and the opening movement, with its shuddering (and harmonically misleading) introduction, clamorous repeated chords, and jagged figurations, is a black meditation of a more explicitly epic kind.
At the same time, somewhat miraculously, this is an actual sonata. The four movements are bound together by shared motifs – most obviously, the repeated note. But there are more subtle motivic linkages: most cleverly, the introduction’s Db-Db-C becomes the theme at m.81, which then becomes the LH’s Eb-Db oscillation in mvt 2’s trio, which then recurs as the F-Gb in the funeral march, and then turns into the two-note sinking motif that opens mvt 4. Mvt 1’s development also features Chopin’s most concentrated motivic writing: despite the whirlwind of varied textures, nearly every bar grows out of the work’s opening moments.
Schmitt-Leonardy
00:00 – Mvt 1 (Grave/Doppio movimento)
08:10 – Mvt 2, Scherzo
15:24 – Mvt 3, Marche
24:47 – Mvt 4, Finale
Shimizu
26:23 – Mvt 1 (Grave/Doppio movimento)
31:27 – Mvt 2, Scherzo
37:26 – Mvt 3, Marche
46:21 – Mvt 4, Finale
Raubo
47:44 – Mvt 1 (Grave/Doppio movimento)
55:32 – Mvt 2, Scherzo
1:02:58 – Mvt 3, Marche
1:11:42 – Mvt 4, Finale
Schmitt-Leonardy – Lush, lyrical, richly detailed. In Mvt 1 the intervallic play in the LH is given surprising attention (you can hear the leaping Bb in m.9, or the quartal flavour from m.25). T2 is hyper-expressive, beautifully voiced. The funeral march is one of the greatest put to record, there’s so much drama in it: overdotting, the subtle continuous crescendo from m.9 to 15, the immediate pullback after the chord at m.15. The repeat in particular is inspired: from m.58 (22:22) an accent is placed on the last beat of each bar, emphasising the Db-Bb drop in the LH; and at m.68 additional octaves enter in the bass to create a terrifying crescendo. Mvt 4 features a lot of creative voicing and subtle pedalling to clarify the structure or shape of a passage (rising/falling shapes, chromatic lines).
Shimizu – Gaunt, uncompromising. No concern for aural prettiness (well, for the most part; T2 in Mvt 1 gets some glorious big-arch phrasing). The focus is on the music’s grinding, inconsolable quality: those breathless figures from m.81, the apocalypse at m.137, the coda’s paroxysmic stretto. The repeated notes in the first three movements are genuinely scary: the scherzo in particular is so brutal and precisely articulated (32:03!) it takes on an Alkaneqsue leer, a cruelty the trio – with its deliberately constricted phrasing – doesn’t quite banish. The funeral march is petrified: its tempo is leaden, climaxes formal and vast, and the middle nocturne given only just enough expressiveness to sound desperate. There is no attempt to make sense of Mvt 4 – it’s one articulation, one tempo, and (nearly) one dynamic, from first note (almost) to the last.
Raubo – Propulsive, dramatic. Mvt 1 features huge contrast between its principal two themes – T1 fast and fierce, the second free and dreamy. This gift for building tension extends into the development, which is characterised by big tempo fluctuations and spasm-like phrasing. The recurrence of the trio at mvt 2’s end is taken slow, like a recollection. The funeral march is played at an actual marchable pace (which also allows for the nocturne to be taken without changing tempo), and Raubo reveals a nice tendency to vary material on repeat: see mm.11-12 (1:03:45), and the F-Gb oscillation immediately after. On the march’s repeat, he introduces a big crescendo to m.65 (old-school stuff!), after which the dynamic immediately drops. At m.80 (1:11:08) there’s an anti-crescendo to vary the repeated phrase, and m.81-82 form yet another dynamically contrasting pair. Mvt 4 falls somewhere between SL and Shimizu – exquisite dynamic control, but not expressive the way SL is.