Steven Osborne has emerged as a major presence in standard 19th century piano repertory, and his Beethoven sonata releases on Hyperion have been much awaited. Osborne is of the British school, with control and smoothness prized over high drama, and it may take you a few minutes of listening to realize just how remarkable he is in sticking to those qualities in this particular program. Osborne fearlessly begins with the Piano Sonata No. 29 in B flat major, Op. 106 ("Hammerklavier"), a work often treated as extreme or ...
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Steven Osborne has emerged as a major presence in standard 19th century piano repertory, and his Beethoven sonata releases on Hyperion have been much awaited. Osborne is of the British school, with control and smoothness prized over high drama, and it may take you a few minutes of listening to realize just how remarkable he is in sticking to those qualities in this particular program. Osborne fearlessly begins with the Piano Sonata No. 29 in B flat major, Op. 106 ("Hammerklavier"), a work often treated as extreme or problematical. Osborne is having none of it. He takes fast tempos -- in the first movement close to Beethoven's perilous half note = 138 -- and keeps things impressively clear under this pressure. The slow movement, at 17 minutes plus, is not an icy hall of emotional death in Osborne's reading, but a kind of oversized nocturne, with the quintessentially late-Beethoven syncopations in the later phases growing naturally out of the texture. The brutal polyphony of the finale is again rendered...
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![Beethoven: Piano Sonatas [Steven Osbourne ] [Hyperion: Cda68073]](https://www1.alibris-static.com/cover/o24396dqqh1_t.jpg)
