Beethoven Complete Sonatas & Variations [Double Album]

These works have been well served on disc. This set certainly belongs among the great ones, and it offers sonics of breathtaking naturalness and realism.

Pieter Wispelwey and Dejan Lazic work exceptionally well together. Two strong-willed artists, everything that they do serves the music, not least in the three sets of variations, which are chock-full of personality and clear delight in Beethoven's early compositional virtuosity (the set based on Handel's "See the conqu'ring hero comes" is especially impressive). In the two early sonatas, with their curiously structured slow-fast-fast form, Lazic and Wispelwey take care to differentiate the two successive quick movements in terms of both tempo and character so as to maximize each work's scheme of contrasts.

In Op. 69 it's wonderful to hear how much drama they bring to the long opening movement, with vivid dynamic contrasts that at the same time never compromise the music's basic pulse. Listen to how sensitive Lazic is to the need to back off in the exposition's triplet theme so that the low notes of the cello don't get buried. Or consider the duo's magnificently moving realization of Beethoven's "con molto sentimento d'affetto" designation in the adagio of Op. 102 No. 2.

This is great playing by any standard, made all the more enticing by Channel Classics' state-of-the-art sonics both in stereo or 5.0 multichannel surround formats. Discrete microphone placement never distorts the ideal balances that the players bring to their music-making, but at the same time, particularly in DSD Multichannel Sound, the performances have a vividness and three-dimensionality that sounds positively uncanny at times. A magnificent achievement on all fronts.

How good is Pieter Wispelwey and Dejan Lazic's 2005 recording of Beethoven's complete works for cello and piano? Easily as good as it gets.

Wispelwey has a subtle tone, a full sound, and a flawless technique coupled with keen musical intelligence and a wonderfully soulful expressivity. Nothing in Beethoven's music is beyond him, not the technical difficulties, not the emotional depths, not the spiritual heights, not even the side-splitting humor. Wispelwey tears into the central Allegro molto piú tosto presto from the early G minor Sonata, rips into the Scherzo of the central A major Sonata, probes the depths of the Adagio con molto sentimento d'affeto in the late D major Sonata, and laughs all the way to the final double bar in the Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen Variations.

With Dejan Lazic's virtuosic but circumspect accompaniment, Wispelwey's performances should be heard by anyone who loves Beethoven's cello works or simply brilliant and spirited playing. Channel Classics' sound is clear, warm, and real.