Pianist Andsnes shines in rare sonatas of Norway at Carnegie
Representing one’s home country abroad is serious business, and pianist Leif Ove Andsnes took it seriously in his Carnegie Hall recital Tuesday night, as two sonatas by fellow Norwegians topped the bill.
Still boyish-looking at 54, Andsnes channeled the 22-year-old Edvard Grieg as the Leipzig-trained composer reached for the grandeur of the German Romantic school in his lone sonata for piano. Happily, Grieg’s lyrical instincts and love of the folk music of his native land peeked through the academic procedures and enlivened the compact four movements of the Piano Sonata in E minor.
The pianist highlighted the first movement’s three-note head-motive, which was none other than the composer’s initials in German notation: E-H-G (H being German for B). Oceanic rumbles and swirls crashed against the rock of this motive and eddied in pools of pianissimo.
Andsnes interpreted the second movement’s ambiguous marking of Andante molto as a fairly lively tempo, bringing out Grieg’s folksy side, before relaxing into tenderly voiced soft chords. The narrow, rotating phrases of the minuet movement had a recognizable Grieg profile; the pianist lovingly shaped the swelling phrases of the trio section.
The sonata’s ambitious finale was beefy one moment and playful the next, very busy in the middle of the keyboard with a Mendelssohnian mix of flying fingers and pretty tunes. A brief but grand coda topped off a piece that was, if not as lovable as the piano concerto Grieg composed a year later, at least a fertile field for passionate pianism.
The Sonata No. 29, “Sonata etere” (Ether Sonata) by Geirr Tveitt came from another century and maybe another universe. By the time the composer-pianist introduced this piece in a Paris recital in 1947, musical nationalism was on the way out in Europe, but Tveitt was collecting mountain tunes as eagerly as ever from his farm on the Hardanger Fjord. (Unfortunately, a fire at his home later destroyed 80% of his life’s work, including his other piano sonatas.)
He had, however, also studied with the luminaries of Leipzig, Vienna and Paris. Stravinsky and Prokofiev didn’t go unnoticed either. The result was an indefinable mix of Norwegian folkways with nature mysticism and impressionistic and percussive piano styles. Otherworldly special effects included holding down a handful of keys silently so that the strings would resonate after a staccato chord was struck.
Andsnes’s imagination and tonal range sustained interest through the three movements of Tveitt’s sonata, which ran more than twice as long as Grieg’s. The first movement, titled “In cerca di” (In search of), began with carillon-like patterns from which a theme gradually emerged, which would echo throughout the sonata. If Debussy was the godfather of these passages, Prokofiev loomed over the toccata-like ones that followed.
The Debussy of “The Sunken Cathedral” was even more conspicuous in the movement “Tono etereo in variazioni” (Ethereal tone in variations), with its tolling bell-chords and slow melodies rising from the depths. The brief variations toyed with rhythm and timbre without venturing far from the music’s watery character.
The finale, “Tempo di pulsiazione” (Pulsation tempo), throbbed steadily in forte and pianissimo passages alike, sometimes humming like a machine, sometimes accelerating into a breaking storm. Big gestures in chords gave way to a final diminuendo, punctuated by three sudden exclamations, an enigmatic close to this endlessly intriguing survivor.
The concert’s second half consisted of Chopin’s Preludes, Op. 28, twenty-four mostly brief pieces that sounded even shorter as a very focused Andsnes dispatched them one by one. He did take pauses now and then, electing for example to let the delicate “Raindrop” Prelude linger in the mind rather than immediately blow it away with the stormy Prelude in B-flat minor.
Though generally favoring fast, flowing tempos, the pianist lingered at times to expressive effect, as in the pathos-laden duet of the B minor Prelude, the stretchy hesitations of the waltz-prelude in A major, and the granitic funeral march of the C minor, with its ghostly echoes.
Andsnes wrung all the drama out of the climactic final Prelude in D minor, sparking a well-earned ovation. He responded with three encores, starting with none other than Debussy’s stately “Sunken Cathedral,” just to bring this unusual program full circle. Two livelier pieces followed, Rachmaninoff’s Étude-Tableau in C major, Op. 33, no. 2, and “In Tears” from Janáček’s On the Overgrown Path, Book I.
Carnegie Hall presents pianist Mitsuko Uchida performing works by Beethoven, Schoenberg, Kurtág and Schubert, 8 p.m. April 9. carnegiehall.org
One Response to “Pianist Andsnes shines in rare sonatas of Norway at Carnegie”
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Posted Mar 28, 2025 at 6:15 am by Steve Alpert
A tour de force performance by the great Maestro. Truly stupefying that a human could produce such joy and mastery in having a piano actually produce such sounds. The Carnegie Hall acoustics were made for a night like this with virtuoso Ove. Echoes from this concert still reverberate in my being.