Sonates Opus 31 / Sonate Opus 109, 110, 111

Description

For me, Pierre Réach is one of the great Beethoven interpreters of our time. He has the stature, the culture, the imagination, and the courage."
- Olivier Bellamy (Radio Classique, Classica)
"We often forget that from his piano, Beethoven opened up other sonic horizons: literally, the final triad was addressed to an instrument from elsewhere, and above all leading elsewhere. Kempff, Arrau, Lefébure against the very nature of his hands, saw the immense, heard the absolute greatness, and for the fingers as well as for the spirit, the transcendence. Nat, Pollini will have joined them by different paths, and Schnabel will have preceded them all. But the sound must first be immense, and from the Prestissimo of Opus 109, Promethean, inducing an absolute struggle that must create vertigo. This very nature of volcanic sound, Pierre Réach, who once devoured Alkan's Four Ages of Life, possesses it: an implosive keyboard and profoundly Beethovenian through ardor, risk-taking, and momentum to the point of abrasion. It would be almost nothing without the spirituality that sings so high, so dense, from the Andante, and will fully realize itself in the Milky Ways of the Arietta two sonatas later, touching with one hand the ultimate and the intimate. Between this alpha and this omega of the ultima verba Beethovenian will rise the peak of Opus 110, and its Fugue, from which you will emerge exhausted, voracious fingers, eagle eye, each line, each crest seems, prodigious first by this absolutely Beethovenian virtue, exaltation. A stroke of genius, as Rudolf Serkin revealed in concert, there are no longer three sonatas, but a single world. The three parts of Opus 31 are not placed in relation to the final triad in vain. In the face of unity, of reiteration, in the face of a path three times traversed to finally reach beyond, Pierre Réach opposes the Sturm und Drang of these opuses which are like the laboratory of a revealed demiurge. A peak, a masterful Tempest through the outbursts, the accents, the very feeling of having entered a landscape, and always this power that would like to exhaust everything that in the furniture conceals an orchestra, and it is justice: Pierre Réach knows well that these Sonatas are symphonies. He owes us the other twenty-six."
- Jean-Charles Hoffelé – Artamag’, Classica