Beethoven
Symphonies Nos 1 & 6 (trans. Scharwenka)
Tessa Uys, Ben Schoeman (piano)
SOMM SOMMCD0677 74:06 mins
Almost all Beethoven’s 19th-century domestic listeners would have encountered his symphonies via piano transcriptions, and Liszt famously created his own. But faced with the challenge of the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony even he gave up: he was ‘inevitably and distinctly convinced of the impossibility of making any pianoforte arrangement for two hands that could in any way be even approximately effective or satisfactory’.
Enter Tessa Uys and Ben Schoeman armed with four hands, with their complete Beethoven series now reaching its fourth volume with the First and Sixth Symphonies. I approached this release with scepticism – it seems such a quixotic thing to do – but I was quickly won over thanks to Franz Xaver Scharwenka’s ingenious solutions to the problems the symphonies throw up. And four hands prove much more than twice as effective as Liszt’s two.
Uys and Schoeman have no trouble creating a world-shaking Beethovenian storm in the Sixth Symphony, and their evocation of the peasant dances have a properly earthy conviviality; when peace descends again, the richness of their palette dispels any hint of boredom. They nicely catch the ebullience and wit of the Menuetto in the First Symphony, and they authoritatively communicate the harmonic complexity of that work’s finale.
We usually think of Busoni’s arrangements in terms of Bach, so it’s nice to learn that he was also a Mozart fan. What this pair do with what Busoni did with Mozart K459 is brilliantly conceived and light as a feather. Michael Church