Sonata Marathon III

Pianist Tamara Stefanovich is more than just a gifted virtuoso, she is above all a free-spirited musical thinker. She demonstrates this once again with this marathon around the classical piano genre par excellence, the sonata. No Beethoven, no ironclad repertoire and no well-trodden paths: Stefanovich instead makes an ardent plea for groundbreaking works from the early Baroque as well as from the 20th century. In three movements of an hour each, Bach is played alongside Busoni and Scarlatti alongside Skrjabin, each time with an introduction by Stefanovich herself. After successful performances at London’s Southbank Centre and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, she now brings her acclaimed programme to the Muziekgebouw, where she has been a cherished guest for over a decade.

The looming shadow of 20th-century horrors has become reality in part three of the Sonata Marathon. Galina Ustvolskaya's Piano Sonata No. 6 (1988) is an unprecedented outburst of violence; the aggressive Piano Sonata No. 1 (1926) by her teacher Dmitri Shostakovich sounds in retrospect like an ominous harbinger. Aleksandr Skrjabin’s ‘Black Mass’ sonata serves as a virtuosic exploration of chromaticism, while Leos Janáček’s Piano Sonata 1.X.1905 is a furious outcry against the killing of a protester. At most, Domenico Scarlatti and Antonio Soler soften the blow of raw expressiveness that Tamara Stefanovich delivers in the final movement of her Marathon.