András Schiff: ‘The Last Sonatas’ (Kajimoto) ★★★★
How much is too much music? What creates a successful program? The first of András Schiff’s two Tokyo recitals in the splendid Opera City Concert Hall left these and other questions in the forefront of this reviewer’s mind. Advertised under the banner ‘The Last Sonatas’, the pair of recitals covers the final two piano sonatas by the four great Viennese masters, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. In a logically pleasing fashion, the first evening was given over to each composer’s penultimate sonata. Beyond this conceptual conceit, there was little else in common between the four works. Even the number of movements varied between Haydn’s two-movement Sonata no. 61 and Schubert’s four-movement Sonata no. 20 (unsurprisingly, these were respectively the shortest and longest items on the program, at about eight and forty minutes). Mozart’s no. 17 and Beethoven’s no. 31 both were listed as three-movement works, although in Beethoven’s case the final movement comprises a complex multi-section fusion of slow-movement and finale functions.
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