Jean-Efflam Bavouzet Revives the Composers Beethoven Blew Away

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet's new Chandos release, The Beethoven Connection, volume 2, gathers the piano works of four composers whom Beethoven eclipsed — and earns a four-star rating from critic Norman Lebrecht, writing his Album of the Week for The Critic.

"Knowing that the best is the enemy of the good, I still like to listen to the competitors that Beethoven blew away," Lebrecht writes.

The album opens musical territory that Beethoven's contemporaries occupied before he redefined it. Johann Nepomuk Hummel arrived in Vienna in 1793, while Beethoven was studying with Haydn. Hummel's E-flat sonata, dedicated to Haydn, shares some Beethoven flashes of enraged rebellion, according to Lebrecht, though its mood is more polite, "not intended to frighten the horses."

Muzio Clementi was, among other things, Beethoven's London publisher and eighteen years his senior. Clementi's G minor sonata, dated 1795, strikes Lebrecht as "arresting and accomplished, at once passionate and, in its adagio, compassionate." Clementi once ran Mozart close in a piano shootout. "You can hear why," the critic writes.

The third composer on the disc, Ludwig Berger (1777-1839), was new to Lebrecht. A Clementi pupil, Berger composed his Grande sonate pathétique between 1812 and 1814, dedicated to his teacher but frankly shadowing Beethoven's sonata of that name. Lebrecht's verdict is blunt: "Berger is a mere tribute act." After finishing the sonata, Berger returned home to Berlin, where he taught piano to Felix Mendelssohn, aged 5, and his sister Fanny, 7.

The final track belongs to a figure Lebrecht does not disguise his feelings about: "that crashing bore Carl Czerny, tormentor of piano students for two centuries with his miserable Etudes." Czerny is represented here by a funeral march he wrote on the day Beethoven died, March 27, 1827. As Vienna's foremost interpreter of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas, Czerny knew the style like his own breathing, Lebrecht writes, and he added "tiny evocative twists that are personal and memorable." The critic's response is unguarded: "I am deeply moved by his seven-minute eulogy."

The excavation is the work of the French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, whom Lebrecht calls "a classical specialist with a twinkle in his fingers." Not the least of Bavouzet's achievements, in the critic's judgment, is to make a modern Yamaha sound like a Streicher fortepiano of Beethoven's time.

Lebrecht's assessment of the collection is compact: "This modest collection is both pleasurable and instructive. I can't wait for the next volume."

Chandos has, by implication, committed to further volumes in the series — and if Bavouzet keeps unearthing repertory of this calibre, the shadow cast by Beethoven over his rivals may prove shorter than history has assumed.