Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax Beethoven

 Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma, Hope Amid Tears, Beethoven Cello Sonatas (Sony)

It's taken me all these years - about fifty - and this new album to realize that it's not Haydn and Mozart that are 'classical' and Beethoven moved into the 'romantic'. Haydn was born in 1732, Mozart in 1756 and Beethoven in 1770, Beethoven was turning 21 when Mozart died. Mozart's date of birth is nearer to Beethoven's than Haydn's.  

It is the first of these three discs where it dawns on me. I had just heard a concert of Mozart's Prague Symphony, no. 38, on the radio which sounded like Beethoven and then the two Cello Sonatas, op. 5, here could almost have been Mozart. Maybe I had known as much for a long time but never quite moved that instinct across into my own private map of music history.

Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma first recorded these sonatas together in 1984 as younger men and did so again as a 'lockdown' project, finding reason to believe that 'we can survive and do good' in Beethoven especially. It's not for me to compare the two sets except to say that what they have the benefit of here is time, not only in the years spent with this music but, particularly in the cello part, that sort of time that an exceptionally gifted footballer always seems to have compared to those around them.  While I have put Yo-Yo first in my title because they are cello sonatas, both the front page of the score - 'klavier und violoncello' - and the billing on the disc put Emanuel first. It might be purely alphabetical on the disc but in these sonatas more than any other, the two parts combine and should be given equal billing rather than regarding the cello as the main part and the piano as accompaniment.

 

The three discs are quite different. The most minor of faults in another great value release is that Emanuel writes a glowing introduction but if we want to know more detail about dates we have to look it up ourselves. Sonatas 1 and 2 are opus 5, the first most noticeably optimistic, feel good and with a lightness of touch that, not for the first time, belie the stormy, imperious impression with which portraits, anecdotes and the other half of his music tend to colour our idea of Beethoven. He was much more complete than that. It's not all Mozart cute and Beethoven less so. 

The second disc is Sonatas 3, op. 69, and 4 and 5, op. 102, and they are from distinctly different periods as the opus numbers suggest. Those on disc one are from 1796, op. 69 is from 1808 and op. 102 from 1815. With the confidence of having looked that up, one can tell. Sonata no. 3 is more muscular and, as such, less charming for me although Emanuel's note tells us it's the best known. The slow movement in no. 5 is the most solemn and desolate, inviting comparisons with the Grosse Fuge, for string quartet, from 1825, for its heart-stopping profundity, whether it be grief, age or wisdom.

The third disc is almost by way of a generous encore. Two sets of variations on themes from The Magic Flute are either side of Variations on a Theme from Handel's Oratorio 'Judas Maccabeus', which many of us might know better as 'Thine Be the Glory'. One can relax a bit more with these. It's a different kind of enjoyment. We have perhaps come through the darker moments of deep searching and philosophy and these are our reward.

It makes for a great album that can be taken a disc at a time or, conceivably, if the opportunity arises, do it all in two and a half hours which would be no hardship.

The William Byrd 1588 album spent more time being played than might have first been anticipated whereas the Ensemble Correspondances programme of Buxtehude and Schutz surprisingly did not, having inadvertently caused offence by its piousness. Perhaps one should not hold what they purport to mean against artworks that otherwise do it all so well but both those albums are plenty long enough, which I realize is an odd thing to complain about. Nobody's saying you have to play them all in one go.

But, with Yo-Yo and Emanuel on three discs, that would not seem forbidding. Something intuitive about generosity, empathy and understanding is always there to be had in the delicacy and the power, the sharing and the purpose. Beethoven takes you everywhere and then a bit further. Like the Piano Sonatas, the String Quartets and the Violin Sonatas, less is as much as the larger, often louder, resources of the Piano Concertos and Symphonies. 

It says huge amounts for Bach, Mozart and Handel that, in spite of all that, I still can't find room for him in my Top 3 composers but it says even more for music that I don't know where Shakespeare, James Joyce and Rembrandt would rate in an even wider list.

Yo-Yo was the guest on Desert Island Discs this morning, which I missed but will catch up with. If you can only have eight records, I don't see how one of them can be Leonard Cohen. I still have over a thousand having sold the pop vinyl off but there had never been any room for him. Still, each to their own. We all have our reasons. But never trust a 'classical' musician's taste in pop or what a 'pop' musician thinks about classical. It doesn't compute.

 

This record puts itself immediately on the very shortest of lists for any Record of the Year award one might feel like dispensing.