Recorded between 1962 and 1966, as a prelude to the year of the composer's bicentennial, this integral somehow prefigures the one that will come a quarter century later: an overtly architectural design, an overview prevails throughout to each other, in a cycle that appears to be fully interconnected. A full 32 work like a mythical Hercules whose fulfillment would inevitably superhuman trails (Arrau not he himself said that Beethoven had reached a state of near-cosmic deity?).
As he also said before this Beethoven cycle, "the perfect interpretation would be made in equal parts to the creation of the author and the recreation of the interpreter"; giving the interpreter at work nothing less than blood. The blood arrau, the weight of sound. A perfectly controlled pianism, tamed spontaneously intellectual, authoritarian and severely austerely noble. A speech-based distinction as far as the density on an impeccable rhythmic mastery as well as on perfectly balanced phrasing.
Here, as later, some people sometimes criticize him some slow, see a certain heaviness; but that would confuse apesantissement and weightlessness. For by the majestic gravity qu'Arrau built arches towards the heavenly dimension. One might object that this is sometimes at the cost of light (especially in the sonatas of Youth). However, it is not true that a certain point of view. Because with Arrau Beethoven is as lit from within: in the cathedral he built, the windows are not designed to let in light but to let her out. Under this immanent luminescence, each work takes on a relief uncommon, as revealing a mammoth skeleton.
So obviously, this rigorous and harsh treatment gives great weight to certain sonatas accustomed to a lighter treatment or a short virtuoso outbursts that might seem a little lost here their immediate radiance. It is certainly a bias that may seem confusing, but which keeps a profound coherence: Arrau professes that the genius of Beethoven is present in each measure, and that in these early sonatas are already the close of the last monumental.
In doing so, his Beethoven is less than bows made of bowings: on the shaft of genius Beethoven are not the leaves that are important to him but it is the fruit. Later, Arrau go even further in this direction, and we give a (quasi-) second integral to truly cathédralesques sounds and mystical depth (but at least sometimes insolent technique, more than four times twenty years).
In addition to this edition, some Variations cycles, the premium famous Diabelli 1952. From first almost opposite that it will record at the end of his life, these Diabelli probably more of a surprise, because the game more Quick and brighter than usual seems offer us a virtuoso Arrau more approaching fifty.
It should however not stop at this immediate impression; Arrau's looking good here in real fuel catalyst Beethoven, scoring the architecture and structure in its splendor. Because even the initial Diabelli waltz has already here more nothing trivial: this often any small coin of dresses cornerstone outset of the entire building, the starting point of a cycle to the confusing reading, entirely driven by an irrepressible need. A treatment that thirty years later find a huge re-expression.
Here again available a monumental piano sum obviously essential to any Beethoven disco.
