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Stormy Applause for
Pianist Bela Hartmann and the Last Three Schubert Sonatas at the Villa Bosch
The Transcendental Franz Schubert
BY
GERHARD HELLWIG
[...]
Bela Hartmann, on the occasion of the anniversary of Schubert’s death on
November 19th, presented the last three piano sonatas. The tightly packed
audience responded to the 34 year old pianist from Stuttgart with frenetic
applause, rewarding a vision of Schubert of transcendental significance. In
this vision, Schubert was anything but a dreamer, he became the vanquisher
of the disappointments and diseases of his life. Hartmann approached this
music with intelligence and innate talent, centring his interpretation on
silence, a silence that seemed sometimes to cry out. Beginning impetuously,
the modulations and defiant octaves of the Sonata in C Minor seemed to
recall Beethoven, mysterious harmonies and tragic thoughts dominated the
Adagio and Minuet, and the final Allegro revealed pensive melodies as balsam
for the soul.
Just as the score demands, the optimism and strength of the opening Allegro
in the Sonata in A, D 959, descended into despair in the Andantino, bringing
complete silence to the audience, a compliment to the pianist, who kept the
listeners spellbound. A consummate technique was evident in the pearling
leggiero of the Scherzo, Schubert’s inexhaustible inventiveness constantly
interrupted by sudden pauses, and the characteristic battle between lyrical
hope and menace was perfectly found in the finale.
The culmination of Hartmann’s tribute to Schubert’s tragically flickering
journey came with the Sonata in B Flat, D 960. Composed in Schubert’s last
year, 1828, it is a document of musical despair. Bela Hartmann succeeded in
realising the “Challenge against the flow of music and of time itself”, as
Dieter Schnebel put it. The sudden interruptions of phrases, the
ever-changing, the graphic images of frozen tears melting in the concluding
moments of the Adagio, the strangely jocular in the Scherzo, all this had
logical continuity in the hands of Bela Hartmann, and no “commercial
sentimentality” (Herbert Marcuse’s phrase) was permitted to disturb the
transcendental Franz Schubert.
Trier, Südkurier, 14.11.2005
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