In 2019 Tamara Stefanovich treated London to a thrilling survey of the piano étude in the last century, from Scriabin to the present day, which was one of the highlights of the musical year in the capital. Now she has turned her attention to sonatas, and devised a three-part recital – over two and a half hours of music, taking in 20 works – that mixes the baroque and the modern, and carefully avoids what many would see as the heyday of the piano sonata, from Haydn and Mozart to Brahms and Liszt.
As well as sonatas by the Bachs, Johann Sebastian and his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, in the first part of Stefanovich’s programme, one-movement sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti and his Catalan successor Antonio Soler provided baroque interludes in each section, each of which was played as a seamless sequence. The ending of one sonata was sometimes elided with the opening of the next so that, for instance, the low G that ends Scarlatti’s Sonata Kk13 became the launchpad for the freewheeling fantasia that opens CPE Bach’s G minor Sonata, while the quiet ending of Soler’s D flat Sonata R110 ushered in the surprisingly pastoral (almost Vaughan Williams-like!) opening of Hindemith’s Third Sonata.
It all seemed a little breathless at times, but Stefanovich generally opted for more reflective Scarlatti and Soler sonatas, aware no doubt that her 20th-century choices rarely offered much repose, whether in her typically fearless performance of Bartók’s hyperactive sonata, her brittle, extrovert one of Hanns Eisler’s Schoenbergian First Sonata, his official Op 1, or her slyly malevolent take on Scriabin’s Ninth Sonata, with its incessant trills and curling wisps of melody. The Second Sonata by Nikolai Roslavets, took over where the Scriabin left off, though as Stefanovich pointed out from the platform, it was more important in the context of the present time that he was a Ukrainian. And finally there was Galina Ustvolskaya’s Sixth Sonata, a thunderous barrage of clusters played with fists and forearms, interspersed with forlorn fragments of melody; an extraordinary end to a remarkable feat of sustained pianism.
