Beethoven’s last sonatas – with preludes by Chopin, Shostakovich, and Bach

…in memoriam Myra Hess (1890-1965)

Fryderyk Chopin - Prelude, opus 45

Ludwig van Beethoven - Sonata in E, opus 109

Dmitri Shostakovich - Preludes, opus 34, nos 10-12

Ludwig van Beethoven - Sonata in A flat, opus 110

Johann Sebastian Bach - ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ BWV 147 (arranged Myra Hess)

Ricercare a 3 from the Musical Offering, BWV 1079

Ludwig van Beethoven - Sonata in c, opus 111

Johann Sebastian Bach travelled to Potsdam in 1747 to meet with King Frederick the Great. During his visit, he improvised a three-voice fugue on a theme of the King’s devising, later developing the music into the Musical Offering. Given that Bach extemporised upon the newly developed Silbermann fortepiano, the Ricercar a 3 can justifiably be regarded as the first significant work for piano.

James Lisney’s musical offerings centre upon Beethoven’s three final sonatas, one of music’s great spiritual journeys, written when the composer was turning fifty years old and occupied with the Missa Solemnis. This transcendent, dramatic, lyrical, and ultimately communicative music is prefaced by complementary preludes by Bach, Chopin and Shostakovich.

Myra Hess was a peerless interpreter of Beethoven’s final sonatas and her transcription of Bach’s chorale prelude Jesu bleibet meinen Freude (from the Advent cantata Herz und Mund and Tat und Leben) is the perfect way to mark her passing sixty years ago this month.

Lisney…made of these sonatas a phoenix, boundlessly expressing a glorious rebirth of Beethoven’s creativity, re-animating the very phrases of his musical processes in all their enchanting, mercurial, forceful, kaleidoscopic variety – brusque and blunt, longing and tender, ineffable and sublime. One felt that all emotions human-beings had ever felt were incomparably here – and, further, some that had been felt only by this extraordinary man and, maybe, just a few others. Lisney gave us a journey of the soul. - The Classical Source

THE QUAY THEATRE, SUDBURY

Tickets: £20