Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Piano Sonata in E Op.109 (1820)
Piano Sonata in A flat Op.110 (1821-1822)
Piano Sonata in C minor Op.111 (1821-1822)
Bela Bartók (1881-1945)
Dirge, Op.9a No.1 BB58 (1909-1910)
Imogen Cooper (piano)
rec. 2025, Snape Maltings, Suffolk, UK
Chandos CHAN20362 [72]

In January 2026, pianist Imogen Cooper announced that she would perform a farewell tour and then retire. This disc with Beethoven’s last three sonatas is to be her last recording. For such a celebrated artist, she has recorded relatively little. In particular, she has made, I believe, only one previous recording of Beethoven, that of the Diabelli Variations, his last piano work (review). I have not heard that, but I can say that this recital is immensely moving and impressive – a worthy swan song for such a distinguished artist.

Beethoven’s last three sonatas are often seen as a coherent triptych – like, for example, the sonatas Opp.2, 10 and 31 – even though they were not composed as such. Indeed, Beethoven was also working at the time on the Missa Solemnis, which took him several years. Imogen Cooper sees them as a journey and playing them like telling a tale, except., she says, in the Arietta, the second and last movement of Op.111, when she says ‘the tale is telling me’.

Op.109 begins with a wayward and romantic first movement, which alternates two distinct tempi; it was apparently first drafted as a stand-alone piece. There follows one of Beethoven’s most ferocious scherzos and then by a theme and variations. It begins prosaically, at least by Beethoven’s standards, but ends in those celestial regions which will be further explored in the last sonata.

Op.110 has a more classical first movement, and a more cheerful scherzo, with some characteristic rhythmic displacements. But this is followed by an improvisatory Adagio leading to a grief-stricken Arioso dolente. This leads to a fugue, but, as Donald Francis Tovey rightly said, Beethoven’s fugues ‘always come to us as if from behind huge gates that open and shut without regard to our expectations’. The Arioso returns and then the fugue, but this time with the subject inverted. This gradually increases in pace and also lightens in mood, so that the close is almost triumphant.

Op.111 is in only two movements, respectively in C minor and C major. The first movement is a final distillation of that fierce C minor mood which we know from the Sonata pathétique and the fifth symphony. The second movement, titled Arietta, is a set of variations on a simple-sounding theme which Beethoven develops with increasingly elaborate subdivisions, ending, like Op.109 but at much greater length, with a sublime restatement in the high treble and accompanied by trills.

You would have thought that nothing could follow this, but we get an encore, an early work by Bartók. It gently brings the listener down from the heights to which they have been transported.

Cooper is a fastidious and poetic artist, playing the lyrical passages most sensitively and without mannerisms. She scrupulously observes Beethoven’s indications, such as his sudden pianos after a crescendo and some surprising stresses, but without pedantry. She is also fully equal to Beethoven’s more strenuous passages, such as the two scherzi and the first movement of Op.111. I particularly liked the way she handled Beethoven’s exchanges of the thematic material from treble to bass in this movement, which have the effect of a sudden reversal of light and darkness. Her interpretation of the fugues does justice to Beethoven’s conception of fugues as dramatic, unlike those of Bach, and she articulates the counterpoint admirably clearly. In the Arietta of Op.111 she maintains the right rhythmic relation between the variations, where Beethoven’s anomalous notation can be misleading.

However, technical excellence is only the start of Cooper’s mastery of these works, both humble and superb. She lays out the music so convincingly that you think that this is how it goes. Her personality becomes a medium through which we see Beethoven’s conception presented by a supreme interpreter. I was blown away by these performances. Phrases from them keep haunting my memory. Of course, there are many other recordings of these sonatas, also of high quality, but this is going to be one of my records of the year.

Stephen Barber

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