Beethoven: The Last Three Sonatas/Mitsuko Uchida album review – the music emerges as if new

There are no major surprises in this live recording, just the simple but sublime sense that the music is being passed from composer, through pianist, on to us

Twenty years ago, Mitsuko Uchida released a studio recording of Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas that remains a benchmark. Now comes this performance recorded live in Tokyo last October.

Those who have loved her previous recording won’t find big surprises – her interpretations remain similar, albeit at times a little broader or more elastic, and with less obvious urgency in, say, the brief second movements of Op 109 and 110. Yet, even from a pianist who has been playing these pieces for so many decades, the music emerges as if new: nothing sounds predetermined. Nor did Suntory Hall, which seats about 2,000, get exactly the same performance as she had given to a much smaller audience at Wigmore Hall in London, two weeks earlier. Most audience noise has been edited out, but the atmosphere of collective concentration remains.

Uchida’s Beethoven remains unassumingly wonderful. The contrasts between loud and soft can be dramatic but are never shocking; the quiet passages offer a kind of communion. The long finales of these sonatas emerge in huge, world-encompassing spans, naturally and organically, but to powerful effect: when in the final movement of Op 110, the solemn, Bach-like fugal theme – with all its almost ecclesiastical certainty – dissolves into Beethoven at his most mysterious, only to return joyfully renewed, the result is profoundly affirmative. There’s no signposting of interpretation, no sense that this music needs a mediator. Instead, it’s as if she is turning over leaf after leaf of the music, and simply handing us what she finds there: from Beethoven, through Uchida, to us.

Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify