Adelaide Reviews

I have been coming to the Adelaide Festival every year since 2017, and one of its highlights for me has always been the weekend called Chamber Landscapes, held at Australia’s most beautiful chamber music venue, Ukaria, near Mount Barker. It was therefore a disappointment to discover that there was no such weekend this year.

Nonetheless, there has been a series of three piano recitals there, by the Finnish pianist Olli Mustonen, and I attended the last of these. In this concert Mustonen played three sonatas written around 1800, and the late Ab sonata op. 110, written about 15 years later.

The Ab major sonata op 26, which opened the program, could well have been entitled, like its two successors in op. 27 which followed in this program, ‘Sonata quasi una Fantasia’. Like both of the sonatas in op. 27, op. 26 doesn’t have a movement in sonata form until you get to the finale. All have a meditative first movement, followed by brief scherzos and a whirlwind finale; but op. 26 also features a funeral march as a slow movement. So it was fascinating to hear all three one after another.

Beethoven used the word Fantasia in the sense that CPE Bach, a composer he much admired, used it. We have got used to a performance tradition in which multi-movement sonatas are played with breaks of indeterminate length between movements. Beethoven frequently writes ‘attacca’ at the end of movements, indicating that the player should not have such a break between movements. The Fantasia, while usually containing many passages of different character, was one piece, not a string of separate movements.

Ukaria was hot, so Mustonen often stopped between movements to wipe the sweat from his brow and his glasses. Everyone was of course sympathetic. But there were times when he did this while holding the pedal down for the last chord, so that we didn’t know when the movement in question actually finished. Between the first two movements of both the ‘Moonlight’ and the late Ab major sonata, that practice created a break which I felt did not do a service to the fantasia-like quality of the sonatas as whole pieces.

Mustonen’s playing is like Ivo Pogarelich on steroids. However, he endeared himself to me with a remark in the program note which went something like this: ‘Although, for perfectly natural reasons, I did not meet Beethoven personally in what we refer to as Real Life’ he felt he knew him intimately through his music. He believes that Beethoven reveals himself personally in his music more clearly than most composers do. From this I gathered that he feels a strong kinship with Beethoven.

This was expressed in a performance which, though often idiosyncratic, were imbued with an inner authenticity. There was no doubt that Mustonen achieved what I think is one of the most important tasks of a performer – he made the music his own. And there were some moments of pure poerty, such as the opening of the Eb sonata, op. 27 no. 1, where the serene legato of the right hand was counterpointed with exquisitely even staccato runs in the left hand. Another such was the extraordinary moment in the finale of the late Ab sonata where a dominant 7th chord on Eb melts into a 6/4 chord of G minor as the brief but desperately tragic slow movement returns. Mustonen made the audience gasp with the surprise of this moment.

Although the whirlwind finales rushed past at breakneck speeds, even the most virtuosic passages never felt like showing off, but were imbued with passionate conviction. This conviction, however, led frequently to a violence which was at odds, not so much with my understanding of Beethoven, but my conception of pianism in general. Every sforzando, a marking which Beethoven uses again and again, was rendered not merely fortissimo, but frequently by using his hand as a mallet, swinging it down sometimes from shoulder height to the keyboard. At first this seemed interestingly different from many performers, but after a little it became a mannerism which, to me, interrupted and distorted the musical discourse rather than imbuing it with excitement. Sometimes the force with which Mustonen struck the keyboard was so great that the notes sounded jangly and out of tune, although Ukaria’s Steinway is a particularly fine instrument and quite certainly was not out of tune of itself.

Another eccentricity was his practice of blurring the harmonies slightly with half-pedalling. When I heard this, particularly in the funeral march movement of Op. 26, I thought – ah, he is not going to be afraid to follow Beethoven’s instructions for the first movement of the ‘Moonlight’ sonata, op. 27 no.2. (Beethoven, not once but twice, at the top of the score of the famous first movement, instructs the player to keep the pedal down for the entire movement. Almost no pianist obeys this, often justifying their neglect of the composer’s quite explicit instructions by declaring that our modern pianos sustain far longer that Beethoven’s instrument, and that he wouldn’t have liked it. I have actually performed this movement on a piano made during Beethoven’s lifetime, and I can confidently assert that, while the decay spectrum is different from that of a modern Steinway, it lasts fully enough to blur the harmonies in ways which our modern ears are not used to.)

But here I was disappointed. Not only did he pedal in a conventional way, but he emphasised the theme, by playing it so much louder than the triplet accompaniment that it seemed to contradict another of Beethoven’s instructions – that the whole movement should be played ‘delicatissamente’ – with utmost delicacy. And there was something about his playing in general, often exaggerating the dynamic difference between tune and accompaniment, that irritated me. Mozart famously declared that there was something in his music for all ears, ‘even long ones’. It seemed to me that Mustonen’s playing was mostly for long ears.

His playing is a very long way from the type of poetic pianism I most admire, such as that of Paul Lewis. But I don’t want that remark to be a value judgement. There is no denying the dramatic force of these sonatas, and there is drama in spades in Mustonen’s renderings. And I was convinced that the exaggerations I have mentioned were not for their own sake, but rather born of a desire to share his experience of the music with his audience in as raw a state as possible. His performance was one of great integrity.