Last year, Mitsuko Uchida’s recording of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, Op 120, was widely acclaimed, nominated for a Grammy and winning the piano category in the gramophone award. Now, coming back to Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas, Ops 109, 110 and 111, a summation of his endeavours in this form, Uchida seems to have acquired new wisdoms from her Diabelli experience, revelling here in the sonatas’ fluctuations between extremes, the movement from calm to ferocious energy and, in the return to tranquillity, finding resolution.
Pianists usually play these three sonatas in a single sequence but, in this instance, Uchida played the first two as a pair, with barely a break and no applause between them. Then, following a normal interval – not entirely normal because people were slightly dazed by the monumentality of it all – came Op 111 with its two massive movements – Beethoven breaking even further with convention – offering a perfect counterweight to the previous two.
