Beethoven Trilogy 3: Unheard
(or
UnHEARD
) completes a set of three
Beethoven
releases by pianist
See Siang Wong
, devoted to obscurities and oddities in the
catalog. The central attraction this time is a set of sketches for the
Piano Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109
. These are not well known, having been held for two centuries in the archives of the publisher Artaria at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Two layers of work have been done with them, the first by composer
Jürg Wyttenbach
and the second by
Wong
himself, filling in various gaps with "elaborations." The result is a set of variations on variations, so to speak. This may seem as though it gets quite a distance from
, but it is not unprecedented;
was an inveterate sketcher, and
Leonard Bernstein
programmed a completed set of sketches for the
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67
, with the
New York Philharmonic
.
's reading does offer insights into
's creative process, even if the main one is that his music had a way of snapping into focus in the finished version. Also included are a so-called
Composition in D major
, probably a start on an early sonata, completed by
; a concerto movement in D major that was proposed as a
work by the 19th century musicologist
Guido Adler
but was probably by
Jan Josef Rösler
(1777-1812); the abortive
Piano Concerto No. 6 in D major
dropped by
in the mid-1810s and completed by
Nicholas Cook
and
Kelina Kwan
; and an
Albumblatt
based by
Wyttenbach
on the first movement of
Op. 109
that had little to do with
beyond a speculative idea that the movement was originally intended by the composer as a part of a set of bagatelles. This is well worth the time of
enthusiasts, with little scholarly feel and instead an attempt to produce genuinely musical realizations of the ideas involved. ~ James Manheim