Beethoven Festival: Naoko Takao
How much freedom is too much?
January 13, 2012The pianist Naoko Takao gave highly personal accounts of four Beethoven sonatas on Jan. 10 in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. The recital was her contribution to a cycle of all the Beethoven piano sonatas sponsored by the San Antonio International Piano Competition. Ms. Takao was the competition’s gold medalist in 2000.
Her program opened with Op. 2, No. 3 in C and Op. 22 in B-flat from Beethoven’s early period and closed with Op. 90 in E Minor and Op. 81a in E-flat (“Les Adieux”) from the middle period.
Ms. Takao’s secure technique allowed her to weather Beethoven’s digital challenges unruffled and with admirable clarity. She had a particularly gratifying way of delineating the interwoven voices in contrapuntal passages. Some of Beethoven's wit wanted more sparkle, and some of the depths went unmined, but on the whole the performances were appealing.
Her tempos tended to be quite free and exploratory, often reflecting a good deal of thought into the dramatic structure of a movement. Sometimes, as in the second movement of Op. 90, she managed both freedom and coherence. Sometimes, as in the slow movement of Op. 22, the tempo play interrupted the line and kept the parts from coalescing into a unified whole -- although the parts were often very beautiful in themselves. The slow movement of Op. 2, No. 3, didn’t quite hang together, either, but there were compensations: A grand ritardando proved an effective setup for a brief fortissimo outburst.
Beethoven obsessively detailed the dynamics in all of these sonatas, but ritardandi and accelerandi appear only sparingly, and (unless my eyes betray me) not at all in the two earlier sonatas. (There is a calando followed by a rallentando just before the end of the C Major.) That circumstance would seem to advise caution in the pushing and pulling of tempos. How much is too much? Ultimately, it’s a matter of taste and communication. Ms. Takao’s choices did seem to emerge from conviction, and there’s much to be said for that.
Mike
Greenberg
