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How wonderfully John O'Conor interprets Beethoven's piano sonatas, injecting the music with delicacy, transparency and refinement through his flawless technique.
Volume III of the pianist's Beethoven cycle includes Sonatas 15, 16 and 18. No. 16, the first of Op. 31, is immediately arresting, the Allegro vivace's semiquaver runs and off-beat anticipations perfectly, gracefully played.
The sonata comes from the start of Beethoven's so-named 'middle period' (the Pathétique and Moonlight are past; the Waldstein and Appassionata are to come), yet O'Conor brings a Mozartian warmth to the proceedings. His fingers bounce and spring off the keyboard, barely touching the keys, producing a neat thimble-full of sound; his pedal work is similarly clean, although a couple of wide rippling arpeggios are too blurred for my taste.
In the Adagio grazioso, the beautiful bel-canto melody is pure and unaffected, the ensuing complex decorative passages virtuosic but never rhetorical. O'Conor makes use of trills to momentarily conjure tension, occasionally emphasising their incongruity in the melodically clean surroundings: listen to how, in bars one and three, the wobbling trills on C and D fall helplessly onto the ensuing notes, dragging one equally helplessly into the melodic line. The movement's final cadential figures are perfectly poised.
It is the Rondo finale that perhaps raises a question. This is a sparky, bouncy movement, but O'Conor can seem too polite, especially in the left hand triplet figurations that should help carry the momentum forward. However, the balance of hands is spot on and, though some fire and indeed some comedy may be missing, strain is also completely absent, even in the Presto conclusion.
The opening bleakly prophetic chords of No. 18, the third of Op. 31, are here hushed and anxious; the alberti bass theme is sprightly, adding effective musical contrast; O'Conor introduces a suddenly darker, more angular sound for the development section, which soon moves towards tired introspection, every staccato jab and scalic run probing a notch further. The Scherzo's lightning hemi-demi-semiquavers and left-right hand antiphonies provide humorous relief. And the Pastoral sonata, No. 15 (Op. 28), is played with no less thought or care, whether we take the splendidly doleful tread of the Andante march or the reclining 6/8 rhythm of the Rondo finale, providing virtuosic yet reposed resolution.
The whole is gorgeously played and recorded in close detail, with extraneous noise at a minimum, if not completely absent. Perhaps at times the fire and comedy could be upped a notch further, but the personable warmth and expression of O'Conor's playing make this a more than welcome re-addition to the extensive Beethoven catalogue.
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