Beethoven: Sonata in A-flat Major, (Lortie, Siirala, Kovacevich)

The most warmly lyrical of all of Beethoven’s late sonatas, and probably my favourite of all 32. Why? Well, to start with the obvious: In a late sonata, where you’d expect ambiguity, radical structural innovation, gnarled counterpoint – a conventional 1st movement, with a theme so simple and unadorned [0:18] its only warrant, really, is its beauty. The development is not just simple but consciously minimalist, and the shift to and from E Maj in the recapitulation [3:36; 4:09] is exquisitely beautiful. There is also the structural tightness of the sonata. The opening bars of the sonata become the subject of the first fugue in the last movement, and, in an inverted form, the subject of the second fugue also. The opening phrase of the 2nd movement scherzo [6:24] also becomes transformed into the arioso of the final movement [10:26]. So Beethoven does not just shift the focus of the sonata form from first movement to last, or even use the final movement to unify the other two – in this sonata, the