This regional Canadian disc -- pianist
Boris Zarankin and youthful baritone
Giles Tomkins are primarily known in the Toronto area -- displays an impressive level of original thinking and technical facility. First there's the overall shape of the program -- Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte (To the Faraway Lover), the first true song cycle, is usually joined with other vocal works, but here it is placed with two late piano works, the Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111, and the Bagatelles for piano, Op. 126. The grouping makes sense, for An die ferne Geliebte, although composed in advance of most of Beethoven's final masterpieces, is very much a late work in its compact but intense melodicism and its bits of almost naïve material put together in revolutionary ways. Better still,
Zarankin's interpretations of the piano works are fresh. He takes at face value Beethoven's dissatisfaction with the instruments of his own time and opines that Beethoven's late keyboard works entailed "a quest for new sonorities on the piano." Further, he emphasizes Beethoven's new reliance on a vocal, singing quality in his themes. The results are unusual, in several cases pushing the focus of the listener's attention toward the end of a movement or musical unit where the pianist's hands are widely separated or where Beethoven exploits the new range of the piano in some other way. The coda of the Op. 126, No. 1 bagatelle, where the hands wander around the ends of the keyboard, seems less a decoration than the main endpoint of the trajectory in
Zarankin's reading of this mysterious little piece. He revels in sharp contrasts, forging an abrupt change of realms between the marcato main section of the B minor Bagatelle, Op. 126/4, and its legato, lyrical second strain -- deemphasizing in the process the bizarre rhythmic configuration of the B minor music, with its ragtime-like effects. The big set of variations that closed out Beethoven's piano sonata career in Op. 111 begins rather plainly and broadens out dramatically in the treacherous triple trill (not quite as sonorous as it could be) and in the journey to remote realms of the keyboard that follows. An die ferne Geliebte itself is less exciting;
Tomkins has an attractive voice but not the emotional range necessary to put across the sentiment in these songs without being garish about it. But
Zarankin's playing is confident, fresh, and attention-getting even for those who have heard many recordings of these late Beethoven works. The sound, from Toronto's venerable Glenn Gould Studios, is clear and unobtrusive.