150 Jahre Bayreuther Festspiele, 150 Elstern aus Pappe und jede Menge Limousinen: Auf dem Grünen Hügel treffen Kunst, Politik und Vermögen aufeinander.

Decca
There are no major surprises in this live recording, just the simple but sublime sense that the music is being handed from composer, through pianist, to us

Twenty years ago, Mitsuko Uchida released a studio recording of Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas that remains a benchmark. Now comes this performance recorded live in Tokyo last October.

Those who have loved her previous recording won’t find big surprises – her interpretations remain similar, albeit at times a little broader or more elastic, and with less obvious urgency in, say, the brief second movements of Op 109 and 110. Yet, even from a pianist who has been playing these pieces for so many decades, the music emerges as if new: nothing sounds predetermined. Nor did Suntory Hall, which seats about 2,000, get exactly the same performance as she had given to a much smaller audience at Wigmore Hall in London, two weeks earlier. Most audience noise has been edited out, but the atmosphere of collective concentration remains.

Wie ist es eigentlich, während einer Aufführung wie ein Orchestermusiker auf einer Bühne zu sitzen? Die „Virtual Hall“ des Orchestre de la Suisse Romande macht das mittels VR-Brille erlebbar – und will damit auch Geld verdienen.

Paul Watkins/Alessio Bax
Signum Classics
Cellist Watkins’ career-long immersion in the composer pays dividends in his pairing with Alessio Bax’s unfussy virtuosity

As cellist of the Nash Ensemble and the Emerson Quartet, Paul Watkins has immersed himself in almost all the chamber music Beethoven wrote. Now he brings those years of experience to his first recording of the cello sonatas. He approached the pianist Alessio Bax for this project after hearing him play the Moonlight Sonata, and his instinct was good: their playing here seems to come from a shared impulse, unflaggingly eloquent without ever seeming to strive for effect.

Together these five sonatas span Beethoven’s composing life. The earliest two date from around the time of his first piano concertos, and they find Beethoven breaking new ground in the way he writes for cello and keyboard as equal duet partners. Both sonatas have slow, serious introductions leading into extended movements showcasing the virtuosity of the pianist, to which Bax rises with a light, crisp touch. The expansive third, Op 69, which Beethoven worked on alongside the Fifth Symphony, centres on a perky middle movement akin to a symphonic scherzo; it’s nicely weighted here, the momentum continuing through all the changes in texture. The final pair of sonatas harness Watkins’s full powers of expression, in particular No 5, the only one of all these to have a full-blown slow movement. It begins in reticent, almost hymn-like style and blooms into something deeply felt; Watkins and Bax handle its closing passages with tightly controlled restraint, then gently clear the air with the introduction to the wrangly little fugue of the finale. It’s all beautifully done.

The Nazis adopted Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Happy Birthday hides a tale of corporate greed. And Putin uses Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony as a call to arms. That’s why I put them in my soundtrack to the complexities of human existence

The idea was always a ludicrous one: to reduce millennia of human musical history – not to mention billennia of the Earth’s sonic geology – into a book of 50 pieces of music. And yet that’s the challenge I decided to take on. The most pressing question was: why? To which my answer was: the inevitable failures and gaps of the project are precisely where its interest lies.

The next concern was how. Called A History of the World in 50 Pieces, the book is not a digested history of music, nor a list of my favourite songs, performances or recordings. Instead, it’s centred on the definition of a “piece of music”. This is a democratic principle – a belief that works don’t belong only to their creators but are shared and reinterpreted by generations of musicians at distances of time, geography and technology, in ways their original composers and performers could not imagine.