Beethoven: Great Sonatas, Rudolf Serkin, piano

Rudolf Serkin’s ambivalence to the recording process, encapsulated by his frequent comment to his producer, “Don’t bother to edit this, I can play it better,” means that, alas, we do not have a complete Beethoven sonata cycle from him. Sony has just reissued all of the recordings that he made for CBS between 1962 and 1980. The sound, inevitably, is of variable quality, but never less than acceptable, while the playing is invariably of a very high order indeed. An essential purchase, I’d say.

Beethoven also features prominently on DG’s twofer, entitled The Incomparable Rudolf Serkin, see Sandy’s review.

About the performer

Rudolf Serkin (1903–1991) was one of the defining Beethoven interpreters of the 20th century, a reputation built as much in the concert hall as on record, the reluctance to over-edit described above was of a piece with a career that prized live performance over studio polish. He and his father-in-law, the violinist Adolf Busch, fled Europe for the United States in 1939 and in 1951 co-founded the Marlboro Music School and Festival in Vermont, an institution built around exactly the kind of unhurried, chamber-music-first music-making Serkin’s own recordings reflect. He also taught at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia for decades, serving as its director from 1968 to 1976, shaping generations of pianists who came after him.

Serkin’s ambivalence towards the recording studio was of long standing: although his 1962 CBS recording of the “name” sonatas (the Pathétique, Moonlight and Appassionata) became a genuine bestseller, he never recorded the complete cycle of 32 sonatas. He had attempted to programme all of them across a series of Carnegie Hall recitals in 1970, but the scale of the undertaking, alongside his responsibilities as the newly appointed director of the Curtis Institute, led him to abandon the project partway through, leaving this reissued Sony set, drawn from sessions between 1962 and 1980, as the fullest record of his Beethoven that exists. Recording sessions for the set took place at various locations over that period, including Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York and, later, in Guilford, Vermont, close to Marlboro, where Serkin spent his summers running the festival he had co-founded. The unevenness of the recorded sound across the reissue, remarked on above, is a direct consequence of that eighteen-year span: microphone technology, tape stock and studio acoustics all changed considerably between the earliest and latest sessions gathered here.