Beethoven, Piano Sonatas, Op. 10

There are now many recordings of Beethoven’s sonatas on fortepiano, amongst the array of available versions on modern instruments. Recorded on a McNulty copy of an 1805 Walter fortepiano, these performances approach these early (1796-98) sonatas via the performer’s own research into Beethoven’s personality, pianistic style and musical language.
There is a rich body of written source material from Beethoven and his contemporaries revealing the composer’s humour and love for puns and witticisms, for instance in his correspondence with Zmeskall, teasing of Schuppanzigh, or in the writings of Czerny. Recently, scholars have pinpointed this same humour in his music: Brendel (1990) and Kinderman (1996) for instance, and the performer himself in relation to Op. 12 No. 2 (PhD 2021, forthcoming monograph 2025). These traits can be found throughout the F Major Sonata recorded here. Gramophone magazine (2022) comments that ‘the pianist’s metric liberties regarding strategic rests in the Allegro of the F major Op 10 No 2 … represent the musical equivalent of expert comic timing’. BBC Music Magazine (2022) notes ‘fine virtuosity in catching the lightness and wit of these sonatas.’
Skowronek (2010) brings together contemporary accounts evoking Beethoven’s ability to enrapturelisteners by making the piano ‘sing’. This trait is abundant in Op. 10, in the slow movements of the C Minor and D Major Sonatas, where Gramophone reports that ‘best of all is his spacious, operatically informed Largo, one of the strongest period-instrument interpretations of this great movement I’ve heard.’ The performances here also engage with the scholarship of Bonds (1991) Schmalfeldt (2011), Horton (2017) and others, picked up by Tong (2021) considering the temporal nature of musical analysis that reveals further witticisms and structural originality within Beethoven’s scores (of the kind often freely attributed to Haydn).
The recording is distributed internationally and available as CD of download/stream.