MINSOO SOHN
In 2020, to mark the composer’s 250th birthday, Minsoo Sohn — a star in his own right and known to us as Yunchan Lim’s teacher — recorded the complete Beethoven Sonatas, the fruit of several years' immersion in the composer's world. Here he performs the last three of these masterpiece works for piano.
Programme
Concert without interval
© MINSOO SOHN
It took Minsoo Sohn over 4 years to perfect his ‘Beethoven Project’. A necessary period of introspection for anyone wishing to resolve the enigma that is the last three sonatas.
Sonata No. 30 demands perfect mastery of the keyboard, with the second theme of the first movement, for example, extending over seven octaves.
A great critical success at the time of its premiere, Sonata No. 31 is remarkably sparing in construction, elaborating from six single notes the entirety of the themes of the three movements, and yet exploring a wide variety of sometimes contradictory emotions; such as the second movement, palpably comic, yet written in the dramatic key of F minor!
A ‘prelude to silence’ according to Alfred Brendel, the last Sonata is a special case in the history of music, one of those works that have provoked and continue to provoke debate, from Richard Wagner, who saw in the first movement ‘the will in its pain and its heroic desire’, to Wilhelm Kempff, for whom the first notes of the second movement are ‘a last step leading from this world into the hereafter’.
