Beethoven's Cello Sonatas mark the fourth collaborative recording by Alexander Zagorinsky and Einar Steen-Nøkleberg, released by the Melodiya. Zagorinsky, an Honored Artist of Russia and professor at the Gnessin Russian Academy of Music, has a vast repertoire ranging from Baroque to 21st-century music. Einar Steen-Nøkleberg is one of Norway's foremost contemporary musicians and a distinguished interpreter of Edvard Grieg's works. Musicians from different generations, countries, and performing traditions, they first performed together on stage in 2002 and have since regularly concertized and recorded, showcasing exceptional ensemble mastery and complete unanimity in their emotional and stylistic interpretation of the music.
The collaboration between Alexander Zagorinsky and Einar Steen-Nøkleberg with Melodiya has been ongoing for five years. The musicians have recorded CDs with sonatas by Romantic composers, chamber cycles by J.S. Bach, and concertos by Bach and Vivaldi. This time, they have turned to Beethoven's sonatas, which form the cornerstone of the classical cello music repertoire. Neither Haydn nor Mozart devoted such attention to this instrument; however, within Beethoven's own compositional legacy, his five sonatas for piano and cello hold a truly unique place.
"Contrast! Always the contrast between the gentle and the stormy. This change is magnificent – this is Beethoven!" exclaimed Pablo Casals about one of Beethoven's cello sonatas. In the vast chamber-instrumental legacy of the "rebel classicist," the five sonatas for cello and piano hold an exceptionally unique place. The first two sonatas (Op. 5) were composed in 1796, alongside his first piano concertos and sonatas; the young genius presented them in Berlin before Prussian monarch Friedrich Wilhelm II, a passionate music lover and amateur cellist, earning his admiration. The Sonata in A major, Op. 69 (1807–1808), whose manuscript contains the author's epigraph "Amid tears and sorrow," is a creative companion to the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies; Casals considered it one of the perfect creations of Beethoven's genius. The two sonatas, Op. 102 (1815), herald the late period of Beethoven's creativity, filled with meditative introspection and polyphonic crystallization of thoughts; the concluding double fugue of the last sonata is one of the most complex peaks, which even two centuries later, few daring musicians manage to conquer.
The booklet article was written by musicologist Roman Nasonov.
